US Supreme Court rejects Trump appeal in Carroll case

The US Supreme Court declined to hear US President Donald Trump's appeal of a $5 million (€4.3 million) verdict in favor of E Jean Carroll after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the former magazine columnist, rebuffing him for a second time.

The justices rejected Mr Trump's request to reconsider their previous decision in June denying his appeal of the 2023 jury verdict stemming from allegations that he raped her in the 1990s in a Manhattan department store's dressing room.

President Trump's lawyers contend the trial was unfair.

The court's order was unsigned and came with no explanation.

The Supreme Court ‌rarely grants requests for reconsideration.

The justices ⁠also are weighing the Republican president's appeal of a separate $83.3 million (€71.8 million) jury verdict for defaming Carroll in 2019 during his first term as president, when he denied the claims and asserted that she lied about the accusations.

Mr Trump's lawyers in that appeal argue that presidential immunity shields him from Ms Carroll's claims and that lower courts wrongly decided that he had forfeited that defence.

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

The president denied Ms Carroll's claims and asserted that she lied both in ‌2019 and again in 2022, while he was out of office.

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

Jurors in that case decided in 2023 that Mr Trump had sexually abused Ms Carroll and defamed her, but did not find that Mr Trump raped Ms Carroll, as ⁠she had claimed.

Following the Supreme Court's denial in June of Mr Trump's appeal in the case, Ms Carroll collected nearly $5.63 million from Mr Trump.

The ⁠payout represented the original $5 million civil verdict, plus interest.

In Mr Trump's request for rehearing, his lawyers said the issue of presidential immunity in the case that led to the $83.3million verdict that a jury reached in 2024 - which the justices still could decide to take up - could impact the 2023 verdict as well.

The Supreme Court in a landmark 2024 decision ruled that former presidents have full immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office that were within ‌their core constitutional powers as president.

The Carroll cases are civil lawsuits.