Supreme Court leaves $5 million E. Jean Carroll judgment in place
The justices let the $5 million Carroll judgment stand, and her lawyers are now pressing for immediate payment after years of appeals.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to take Donald Trump’s appeal left intact the $5 million judgment against him in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation case, and her lawyers moved quickly to turn that legal loss into a payment order. The justices declined certiorari on Monday and noted no dissents. Carroll’s team asked a federal judge to require Trump to pay the full award, plus interest, after what Roberta Kaplan called four years of litigation across every level of the federal court system.
The judgment traces to a 2023 New York federal jury verdict that found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and defaming her after she accused him publicly. Carroll filed the underlying lawsuit in 2022 in federal court in New York, alleging that Trump assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in Manhattan in 1996 and later defamed her in 2022. The money has been held in escrow while the appeal played out, and Carroll’s lawyers argued in their filing that under the stipulation and order, Carroll is now entitled to payment.
Kaplan said Trump’s lawyers asked whether Carroll would agree to another stay so he could seek reconsideration from the Supreme Court. Kaplan rejected that prospect, saying it is time for the case to end and, more bluntly, that it is time for Trump to pay Carroll. The filing asks whether the escrowed funds move immediately or whether Trump can try one more procedural delay.
Trump signaled he was not done. On his social media platform, he said he would continue fighting the case and called it “Weaponization and Lawfare.” Carroll, meanwhile, posted a brief celebration on Substack that read, in all caps, “WE WON!” and “THIS WIN IS FOR EVERY WOMAN IN THE WORLD!”
The Supreme Court petition focused on whether Federal Rules of Evidence 415, 413 and 404(b) allowed the trial judge to admit testimony from other women and the 2005 Access Hollywood tape. Trump argued that evidence should have been excluded; Carroll said any error would not have changed the verdict. The petition was first set for conference in February and then rescheduled more than a dozen times before the justices considered it for the first time on June 25.
Trump still faces a separate Carroll defamation judgment of $83.3 million, plus interest, that the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld in September 2025.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
