Carroll verdict against Trump stands as high court turns down second appeal

Kaplan: verdict ‘now final and cannot be challenged in any court’

The US Supreme Court has declined for a second time to review President Donald Trump’s bid to overturn a federal civil jury verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. The court posted the decision Monday as part of an order list without offering an explanation for why the justices declined to rehear the case. Trump’s lawyers had asked the justices to reconsider their June rejection of an earlier petition.

Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said in a statement that the court’s action makes the jury’s unanimous verdict final. “We are pleased that the United States Supreme Court has declined again to hear this case,” Kaplan said. “As a result, the jury’s unanimous verdict that Donald Trump sexually assaulted and then defamed E. Jean Carroll is now final and cannot be challenged in any court,” she added.

Legal experts said Trump’s renewed request was an unusual long-shot legal manoeuvre, noting that the court rarely grants similar requests to reconsider its own prior decisions.

The underlying civil case stemmed from Carroll’s claim that Trump attacked her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. Carroll, a former magazine columnist who is now 82, won the civil suit. The defamation portion of the verdict arose from a 2022 post on Truth Social in which Trump denied the claims and said Carroll was “not my type.”

In July, Trump paid Carroll more than $5m (£3.6m) in damages over her civil claim, and then branded the incident a hoax on social media. Trump has yet to comment on the court’s latest decision.

After the earlier June decision, Trump vowed in a lengthy Truth Social post to continue battling what he termed the “weaponisation and lawfare case” and the “ridiculous” claim of defamation. “This Case is really against the United States of America, and all it stands for, and should never be allowed to happen to another President, or Candidate to be,” he wrote.

In his initial petition to the Supreme Court, Trump’s lawyers argued that Carroll’s lawyers should not have let jurors see the Access Hollywood footage from 2005 in which he used crude language as he discussed groping and kissing women.

Separately, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to overturn a federal civil defamation verdict awarding Carroll $83.3m. His lawyers have argued that Trump cannot be sued for comments he made while he was president. The court has not made a decision in that case.