US court won't hear Trump appeal in E Jean Carroll case

The US Supreme Court has declined to hear President Donald Trump's bid to overturn a $5 million verdict in favour of E Jean Carroll after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing the former magazine columnist and then defaming her.

Judges rejected his appeal after a lower court upheld the 2023 verdict.

They did not accept Mr Trump's arguments that the trial was unfair because the judge impermissibly let jurors hear evidence of his alleged past sexual misconduct.

The president has been battling Ms Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019 in which she alleged that he had raped her around 1996 in a department store dressing room in New York.

Mr Trump denied the claims and asserted that she lied about the accusations twice - once in 2019 while he was serving his first term as president, and again in 2022 when he was out of office.

The US Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation targeting Ms Carroll, as it has against several other adversaries of the president.

The inquiry, disclosed in May, was focused on whether she committed perjury in testimony tied to the two civil lawsuits that she won against Mr Trump.

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

"This woman is not my type!" he added.

Ms Carroll sued President Trump in a federal court in Manhattan.

Jurors in 2023 decided that he had sexually abused and defamed her, awarding $5m in damages.

They did not find that Mr Trump raped Ms Carroll, as she had claimed.

A Manhattan-based appeals court upheld the verdict in 2024, ruling that evidence, including the president bragging about his sexual prowess on an Access Hollywood video that surfaced during the 2016 election campaign, established a "repeated, idiosyncratic pattern of conduct" consistent with the allegations.

President 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 maximize political injury to him and profit for herself," his lawyers wrote in a filing.

The court, in the other legal action that Ms Carroll won in 2025, declined to throw out an $83.3m verdict, reached by a jury in 2024, for defaming her when the president first denied her claims in 2019 and asserted that she fabricated the accusations to sell her book.