US Supreme Court rebuffs Trump’s appeal in E. Jean Carroll case

WASHINGTON - The US Supreme Court declined on June 29 to hear President Donald Trump's bid to overturn a US$5 million (S$6.5 million) verdict in favour of E. Jean Carroll in a case in which a jury found him liable for sexually abusing the former magazine columnist and then defaming her.

The justices turned away Trump's appeal after a lower court upheld the 2023 jury verdict and rejected Trump's arguments that the trial was unfair because the judge impermissibly let jurors hear evidence of his alleged past sexual misconduct.

Trump has been battling Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, ever since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019 in which she alleged that Trump had raped her around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.

Trump denied Carroll's claims and asserted that she lied about the accusations both in 2019 while he was still serving his first term as president, and again in 2022 when he was out of office.

Trump expressed disappointment in the Supreme Court's decision not to hear the appeal and called Carroll's lawsuit "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. 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!" Trump wrote on social media.

Trump's Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation targeting Carroll, as it has against several other adversaries of the Republican president. The investigation, disclosed in May, was focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in testimony tied to the two civil lawsuits that she won against Trump.

The case that led to the US$5 million verdict concerned Trump's statements in 2022 when he called Carroll's claim a "hoax" and a "con job" in a post on social media.

"This woman is not my type!" Trump added in the post.

Carroll sued Trump in federal court in Manhattan. Jurors in 2023 decided that Trump had sexually abused Carroll and defamed her, awarding US$5 million in damages. They did not find that Trump raped Carroll, as she had claimed.

The Manhattan-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in 2024, ruling that evidence, including Trump bragging about his sexual prowess on an Access Hollywood video that surfaced during the 2016 US presidential campaign, established a "repeated, idiosyncratic pattern of conduct" consistent with Carroll's allegations.

Trump's lawyers told the Supreme Court that the trial judge "erroneously allowed testimony about multiple decades-old, unverified and unrelated allegations to be presented to the jury," flouting federal rules governing the admission of evidence in a case.

"Carroll waited more than 20 years to falsely accuse Donald Trump, who she politically opposes, until after he became the 45th President, when she could maximise political injury to him and profit for herself," his lawyers wrote in a filing.

The 2nd Circuit in the other lawsuit Carroll won in 2025 declined to throw out an US$83.3 million verdict reached by a jury in 2024 for defaming her when Trump first denied her claims in 2019 and asserted that she fabricated the accusations to sell her book. REUTERS