Supreme Court Rejects Trump's Final Carroll Appeal
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- Supreme Court declined without explanation to hear Trump's appeal of the 2023 civil verdict, giving no customary reasoning and foreclosing his last avenue to overturn the unanimous jury finding
- Carroll was awarded $5 million (£3.6 million) by a New York jury who found Trump sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s; Trump denied the allegations, said she was "not my type," and called her account a hoax on social media
- Federal appeals court upheld the unanimous jury verdict last year and denied a new trial, agreeing with Trump that the judge improperly allowed evidence but finding no grounds for a retrial
- A separate jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83 million for defamation, and a panel of federal judges denied his appeal of that award in September
- Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan said the Supreme Court ruling "affirms once and for all the jury's unanimous verdict" and "ends his quest to avoid accountability for his actions"
- Trump posted on Truth Social after the ruling that he would continue to fight what he called a "Weaponization and Lawfare Case," arguing the underlying New York law was "tailormade" to target him
- Trump's Supreme Court petition argued that jurors should not have been shown the 2005 Access Hollywood tape depicting him discussing groping women; the jury rejected Carroll's separate rape claim as defined by New York penal code
Why it matters: The ruling is final: Trump must pay the $5 million in damages awarded in the 2023 sexual abuse verdict on top of the separate $83 million defamation judgment upheld in September, leaving the jury's findings of sexual assault and defamation intact against a sitting president. For Carroll, now 81, the decision closes a legal odyssey she began after Trump's 2022 Truth Social post denying her account.
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