President Donald Trump has asked the Supreme Court to review the $5 million civil verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.
Trump’s legal team urged the justices to overturn the ruling, arguing that Carroll’s decades-old allegation was politically motivated and unsupported by direct evidence. Caroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s in a New York department store.
“There were no eyewitnesses, no video evidence, and no police report or investigation,” the filing said, according to documents reviewed by Axios and CNN.
“Instead, 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 maximize political injury to him and profit for herself.”
A federal appeals court last year upheld the jury’s verdict, confirming that Trump must pay Carroll in compensatory and punitive damages for defaming her in his public statements. Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, told Axios in September that the decision reaffirmed that “E. Jean Carroll was telling the truth, and that President Donald Trump was not.”
Kaplan told The Daily Beast Podcast last month, “There’s nothing in that case that’s SCOTUS worthy.”
The Supreme Court has not yet added the case to its public docket, and it remains unclear whether the justices will agree to hear it.
Trump’s lawyers are appealing the case on evidentiary issues, arguing that the district judge should not have allowed a woman to testify about Trump accosting and assaulting her on an airplane in 1979.
Kaplan told the Beast’s podcast that lawyers usually cannot introduce prior “bad acts” as evidence of a specific wrongdoing, but federal rules of evidence were specifically amended to allow that type of testimony in sexual assault cases.
“Here, the Second Circuit concluded that even if the court had been incorrect in admitting her testimony, it’s what’s called ‘harmless error’ because we had another 10 or 11 witnesses, and they had zero,” Kaplan said.
Carroll told the podcast she wants to give most of the money to “everything Donald Trump hates,” including efforts to strengthen women’s reproductive rights and voting rights.
Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, has successfully sued Trump twice. After Carroll described the attack in 2019 in a New York magazine article and in her book What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal, Trump accused her of lying and said he had never met her.
Carroll then sued Trump for defamation and eventually received the $5 million judgment.
In 2022, while the first case was ongoing, Trump accused Carroll in a Truth Social post of inventing the encounter to sell books.
The author filed a second suit for defamation and added a claim for sexual battery under the newly passed Adult Survivors Act, which allowed sexual-assault victims to file civil suits beyond the expired statute of limitations. That jury found Trump liable in 2024 for $83.3 million.
The case is about a year behind the first case in terms of making its way through the appeals process, Kaplan said.
The $5 million for the first verdict has been sitting in an account held by the court, accruing interest.
Trump’s legal team framed the Supreme Court petition as part of a broader effort to challenge what they describe as politically motivated cases against him.
“The American people stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the witch hunts,” a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said in a statement. “President Trump will keep winning against liberal lawfare as he continues to focus on his mission to Make America Great Again.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to both parties for further comment.
