Carroll seeks Trump payout after Supreme Court rejects appeal

E Jean Carroll is asking a federal judge to make President Donald Trump pay nearly $5.8 million after the US Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal of a civil verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.

Carroll’s lawyers moved this week to collect the damages, which began as a $5 million jury award in May 2023 and have grown with interest. On Wednesday, Judge Lewis Kaplan agreed that Carroll could pursue the payment on an expedited basis and ordered Trump’s legal team to respond by July 7, Al Jazeera reported.

The request followed the Supreme Court’s decision Monday not to review Trump’s challenge to the verdict, leaving lower court rulings in place. Carroll’s lawyers said she had repeatedly agreed to Trump’s requests to delay payment while he pursued appeals.

“Given the extraordinary lengths he has taken to avoid such payments and that each of those efforts has been denied in full, that cooperation ends today,” they wrote in a court filing. “It is time for him to pay Carroll.”

Carroll, an 82-year-old writer and former magazine advice columnist, accused Trump of attacking her in the mid-1990s in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, a department store in Manhattan. Trump denied the allegation and later called it a hoax on social media.

In the May 2023 civil case, a New York jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but did not find him liable for rape. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages over her claims that Trump assaulted her and defamed her by branding her a liar.

Trump has argued that the trial was mishandled because jurors were allowed to hear evidence related to allegations of past sexual misconduct. A federal appeals court upheld the verdict last year, saying Judge Kaplan had not made errors that would justify a new trial.

Carroll first sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after he denied her allegations, said she had lied for personal gain and dismissed her as unattractive. “Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?” Trump told The Hill that year, according to Al Jazeera.

She filed a second civil suit in 2022, alleging defamation and battery under New York’s Adult Survivors Act. That case cited a Truth Social post in which Trump called her claim a “complete con job” and described the allegations as a “scam” and “hoax.”

After the Supreme Court declined to take up his appeal this week, Trump again attacked the case on Truth Social. “Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a fake case brought against me,” he wrote, according to the BBC. He said he would continue fighting what he called a “Weaponization and Lawfare Case” and “the ridiculous claim of Defamation, with all of my power and strength.”

Carroll’s lawyers included that post in their new filings. They accused Trump’s team of having “slow-rolled” payment by “asserting or inventing a new [defence] each time his prior effort to delay the case fails,” Al Jazeera reported.

“After four years of litigation across every level of the federal court system, it is time for this case to end,” Carroll’s lawyers wrote.

Trump has also appealed a separate 2024 jury verdict that awarded Carroll $83.3 million for another instance of defamation. A panel of federal judges denied his appeal of that decision last year, and Al Jazeera reported that the second case has not yet been considered by the Supreme Court.