WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday declined a request by President Donald Trump to review a $5 million civil judgment against him after a jury found in 2023 that he sexually abused and defamed writer E. Jean Carroll.

The announcement by the justices did not include any reasoning, and no public dissents were noted.

A second case that arose out of Carroll’s allegations also could be headed to the Supreme Court. In January 2024, a separate jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million in damages for defaming her in 2019 after she accused him of a decades-old rape.

Lawyers for Trump have said they plan to ask that the justices also hear that case.

A Major Blow for Trump

Still, Monday’s decision is a major blow to Trump, likely marking the end of his legal efforts to contest the jury verdict finding that he assaulted Carroll in the mid-1990s in a department store dressing room.

It came after the court ruled in February that the president had overstepped his authority by issuing sweeping tariffs using emergency powers. That decision, which dealt a sharp blow to Trump’s economic and foreign policy strategy, drew sharp criticism from the president, who referred to the justices who voted against the tariffs as “fools and lap dogs” and a “disgrace to our nation.”

After the court’s announcement Monday, Trump’s legal team released a statement calling Carroll’s cases a “Democrat-funded travesty” and adding that “President Trump will keep winning against liberal lawfare.”

Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said the decision “affirms once and for all the jury’s unanimous verdict that President Donald J. Trump sexually assaulted and defamed E. Jean Carroll. His multiple efforts to appeal that verdict have all failed, and today’s ruling ends his quest to avoid accountability for his actions.”

In May 2023, a federal jury in New York found the president liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll.

The jury agreed that Carroll, a former magazine writer, had sufficiently shown that Trump sexually abused her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store when the two crossed paths in the 1990s. Further, the jury found that Trump had defamed Carroll by posting a statement on social media calling her case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.” Throughout, Trump denied Carroll’s allegations.

Access Hollywood Tape

Among other evidence, the jury heard claims by two women in addition to Carroll that Trump had assaulted them, and an excerpt from the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump can be heard bragging that he had a practice of grabbing and kissing women without consent.

After the verdict, Trump appealed to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, asserting, among other things, that the trial judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, erred by allowing the evidence of the two women and the tape excerpt to be shown to the jury.

In December 2024, a three-judge appeals court panel upheld the jury’s verdict, finding that Trump failed to show that the evidence had harmed his rights to a fair trial.

Trump then asked the justices to weigh in and find that the trial court had erred.

In a brief to the court, lawyers for Trump described the evidence as “multiple decades-old, unverified and unrelated allegations.”

Irrelevant Questions

They also claimed that the appeals court had incorrectly applied the law and argued that the justices needed to step in because “if left uncorrected, these errors will recur in a host of future civil and criminal cases.”

Lawyers for Carroll asked the justices to reject the president’s petition.

In a brief to the justices, lawyers for Carroll wrote that the Supreme Court “routinely declines” to take up cases “when the questions presented are irrelevant to the outcome below.” They added, “such is the case here.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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By Abbie VanSickle/Sarah Blesener

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