E Jean Carroll demands Donald Trump pay $5.8m in damages from 2019 case
Carroll’s lawyers have asked for an expedited resolution to the payment question, after the US Supreme Court declined Trump’s appeal. Writer E Jean Carroll is
Carroll’s lawyers have asked for an expedited resolution to the payment question, after the US Supreme Court declined Trump’s appeal. Writer E Jean Carroll is demanding that United States President Donald Trump pay the $5m a civil court awarded her in damages, after the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. On Wednesday, Judge Lewis Kaplan agreed that Carroll could pursue the payment on an expedited basis. He called on Trump’s legal team to respond no later than July 7. A day earlier, Carroll’s lawyers urged the court to act. In legal filings, they have accused the Trump team of having “slow-rolled” the payout by “asserting or inventing a new [defence] each time his prior effort to delay the case fails”. Trump has been battling Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019. In the segment, she alleged that Trump raped her around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.
Trump denied Carroll’s claims, saying she lied about the accusations. He also dismissed her as unattractive. “Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?” Trump told the publication The Hill in 2019, roughly two years into his first term as president. By November that year, Carroll had filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump, accusing him of damaging her reputation by suggesting she had lied for personal gain. She filed a second civil suit in 2022, alleging both defamation and battery under New York’s Adult Survivors Act. That case cited a Truth Social post Trump had written calling her a “complete con job” and dismissing her accusations as a “scam” and “hoax”. A jury in the first case sided with Carroll in May 2023, finding that Trump was liable for sexual abuse and defamation by branding her a liar.
It did not determine that Trump was liable for rape, however. In the second case, which was decided in January 2024, a jury awarded Carroll $83.3m in damages. Trump has appealed both decisions, arguing that the trials were mishandled because the juries were allowed to hear evidence related to allegations of past sexual misconduct. On Monday, however, the Supreme Court refused to hear his petition for the $5m jury decision to be overturned, allowing lower court rulings to stand. The second case has yet to be considered by the high court. Following this week’s ruling, Trump returned to Truth Social to denounce Carroll’s lawsuit as a “fake case”. “I will continue the fight against this Weaponization and Lawfare Case against me, including the ridiculous claim of Defamation, with all of my power and strength,” he wrote. “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!” Since the original jury decision was made, interest has grown the reward from $5m to roughly $5.8m.
The BriefWire