The US Supreme Court has rejected President Donald Trump's request to overturn a $ 5 million verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll in a case in which a jury found him guilty of sexually assaulting the former magazine writer and subsequently defaming her, Reuters reported, quoted by BTA.
The judges rejected Trump's appeal after a lower court upheld the jury's 2023 verdict and rejected the arguments of Trump that the trial was unfair because the judge improperly allowed jurors to hear evidence of his alleged past sexual misconduct.
Trump has been in a legal battle with author E. Jean Carroll, who advised Elle magazine, since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019 in which she alleged that Trump raped her around 1996 in a fitting room at Bergdorf Goodman. in Manhattan.
Trump has denied the author's claims, saying she lied about the allegations both in 2019, while he was still serving his first term as president, and again in 2022, when he was no longer in office.
Trump's Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, as well as several other opponents of the Republican president. The investigation, which became public in May, focused on whether the author committed perjury in her testimony related to the two civil lawsuits she won against Trump.
The case that led to Trump's $5 million settlement involved statements he made in 2022, in which he called E. Jean Carroll's claim a "fraud" and a "fraud" in a social media post.
"This woman is not my style!", Trump added in the post.
E. Jean Carroll sued Trump in federal court in Manhattan. In 2023, a jury found that Trump sexually abused her and defamed her, awarding her $5 million in damages. They did not find that Trump raped E. Jean Carroll, as she claimed.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld the conviction in 2024, ruling that the evidence, including Trump boasting about his sexual prowess in an "Access Hollywood" video that surfaced during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, established a "repeated, characteristic pattern of behavior" consistent with E. Jean Carroll's allegations.
Trump's lawyers told the U.S. Supreme Court that the trial judge "wrongly allowed testimony to be presented to the jury on multiple allegations dating back several decades, unverified, and unrelated to the case", violating federal rules governing the admission of evidence in a case.
"E. Jean Carroll waited more than 20 years to wrongfully accuse Donald Trump, whom she opposes politically, until after he became the 45th president, when she could have caused him maximum political harm and benefited herself," his lawyers wrote in a written statement.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the other case, which E. Jean Carroll won in 2025, refused to overturn the $83.3 million jury verdict against her in 2024 for defamation when Trump first denied her allegations in 2019 and said she made up the accusations to sell his book.