Moment of Truth Approaches for Trump’s Supreme Court Appeal of $5 Million ‘Sexual Abuse’ and ‘Defamation’ Verdict in E. Jean Carroll Case

The Supreme Court could decide as early as next week whether to hear President Trump’s appeal of the $5 million verdict against him in a lawsuit brought by the sex and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll — a grant of certiorari that would be a boon to the 47th president. The justices will meet on February 20 in a private conference to consider petitions for review. Four justices are required to elect to hear a case for it to be added to the Supreme Court’s docket. While that could happen as soon as the 23rd, justices have habitually let petitions simmer for at least two conferences before granting them. That could push the timeline for any decision into early March. Mr. Trump has appealed to the highest court to reverse the judgment secured by Ms. Carroll, 82, from a federal jury in May of 2023. The jury found that Mr. Trump was liable for sexual abuse and defamation after Ms. Caroll alleged, in a 2019 cover story in New York magazine titled “Hideous Men,” that Mr. Trump had raped her in a dressing room on the lingerie floor of Bergdorf Goodman, the upscale Manhattan department store, sometime in the 1990s. Mr. Trump, at the time, called her accusations “a complete con job” and “a lie,” hence Ms. Carroll’s defamation claim. In his appeal, Mr. Trump denounces the lawsuit as “facially implausible” and “politically motivated.”In December of 2024 a panel of the Second United States Appeals Circuit rejected Mr. Trump’s invitation to overturn that verdict. Some months later, the full Second Circuit also declined to vacate the judgment. Now Mr. Trump contends that he “clearly and consistently denied that this supposed incident ever occurred” and that Ms. Carroll “waited more than 20 years to falsely accuse Donald Trump, who she politically opposes.”The $5 million awarded to Ms. Carroll for her first lawsuit pales in comparison to the $83 million awarded to Ms. Carroll by a second jury for further defamation. Mr. Trump said, after he’d already been found liable for sex abuse and defamation, that he’d “never met” Ms. Carroll and that her accusations should be sold in the “fiction section.” This gave Ms. Carroll the opportunity to sue him again. Mr. Trump appealed that award too, only for a Second Circuit panel to find that “Given the unique and egregious facts of this case, we conclude that the punitive damages award did not exceed the bounds of reasonableness.” The circuit riders called Mr. Trump’s invective against Ms. Carroll “extraordinary and unprecedented.” The next stop in that appeal is the full Second Circuit. Mr. Trump, who is a few years younger than Ms. Carroll, has ninsisted that Ms. Carroll is “not my type,” a phrase that she swiped for her bestselling book of last year. The president’s case for certiorari rests on the decision by the presiding judge, Lewis Kaplan, to allow into evidence testimony from two other women that alleged that they were assaulted by Mr. Trump — as well as the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape.Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, no relation to Judge Kaplan, argues that even if those pieces of evidence were improperly admitted into evidence, the outcome would not have changed, “taking the record as a whole and considering the strength of Ms. Carroll’s case.” Ms. Kaplan insists that “any ruling from this Court would not affect the Second Circuit’s judgment” that Mr. Trump is liable for the $5 million.Mr. Trump has called Judge Kaplan “biased and hostile” and declares that the jurist “suffers from a major case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Crucially, Judge Kaplan refused to allow Mr. Trump to contest the finding of sexual abuse in the second, $83 million trial, saying that as far as his court was concerned, it was a proven fact that Mr. Trump had sexually abused Ms. Caroll. The judge further enraged Mr. Trump when he explained that the “finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”Ms. Carroll who wrote for Elle for nearly three decades, was aided in her suit by a new New York law, the Adult Survivors Act, which was passed at the height of the #MeToo movement, creating a one-year window for purported survivors of sexual assault to sue their alleged attackers even if the statute of limitations had passed. Ms. Carroll, though, has yet to collect a dime of her awards as the case wends through the appellate process. Mr. Trump had to take out a $90 million bond and put $5 million in escrow, but that money could take years to get to Ms. Carroll. A description of Ms. Carroll’s latest book provided by her publisher teased that “You’ve heard about the tantrums, the seething, the storming out of court, yes. But what about E. Jean’s side of the story? What about the flight suits, the bottle of green Chartreuse, and the bob?”

Moment of Truth Approaches for Trump’s Supreme Court Appeal of $5 Million ‘Sexual Abuse’ and ‘Defamation’ Verdict in E. Jean Carroll Case

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