The denial by the Second United States Appeals Circuit of President Trump’s appeal of the $5 million verdict against him in the sexual abuse and defamation case brought by a sex and romance writer, E. Jean Carroll, 81, sets up a possible Supreme Court showdown. The Second Circuit has not yet ruled on Mr. Trump’s request to vacate a separate verdict of $83 million for defaming Ms. Carroll when he denied her allegations. 

Mr. Trump now has 30 days to appeal the verdict to the high court, which, endowed with the power of discretionary review, is not obligated to hear his petition. According to the “Rule of Four,” that number of justices is required to vote to grant certiorari for the case to be added to the Supreme Court’s docket. 

Ms. Carroll went public in 2019, with a book and an accompanying article in New York magazine, accusing Mr. Trump of raping her in a dressing room on the lingerie floor of an upscale Manhattan department store, Bergdorf Goodman, sometime in the 1990s. 

After Mr. Trump denied the accusations, saying she was “totally lying,” Ms. Carroll sued him for defamation. In 2022, she sued him again, this time alleging assault and defamation. She was taking advantage of 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. 

Two Manhattan juries found against Mr. Trump. One jury found him liable for sex assault and defamation — and  not liable for rape— and awarded Ms. Carroll $5 million. A second jury found him liable for further defamation, and awarded her another $83 million.

The denial of the 47th president’s appeal of the $5 million judgement comes from a panel of three riders of the appellate court — all appointed by Presidents Obama or Biden. Judge Lewis Kaplan’s sentence was handed down after a jury found Mr. Trump liable for defamation and sexual abuse. The Second Circuit has not yet ruled on the $83 million verdict. 

The Second Circuit has also denied Mr. Trump’s request for a hearing of the full appellate bench. One circuit rider, Steven Menashi, wrote a scathing dissent from the decision not to grant Mr. Trump’s request for a full hearing. He reckoned that his colleagues “sanctioned striking departures” from legal precedent “to justify the irregular judgment in this case.” Judge Menashi was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump in 2019. 

Mr. Trump has also appealed the initial $83 million defamation verdict and oral arguments in that case were heard last month. The president is arguing that the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States that official presidential acts are presumptively immune from prosecution shields him. That case, though, involved criminal and not civil charges. The Second Circuit has not yet ruled on that verdict.

The Second Circuit also rejected Mr. Trump’s request that the Department of Justice replace him as the defendant during the pendency of his appeal in the $83 million case. The president argued that ​​”the United States is the party defendant unless and until a court rules to the contrary.” If that request had been granted, taxpayers would have paid for Mr. Trump’s defense — and possibly for the judgment against him.    

During the trial in the defamation case, Judge Kaplan refused to allow Mr. Trump to challenge the jury’s finding of sexual abuse in his first one. Judge Kaplan went further and also determined that Ms. Carroll demonstrated that Mr. Trump “‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed … the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.” He admitted that Mr. Trump was not liable for rape  “within the narrow, technical meaning” of the law.

Mr. Trump raged against Judge Kaplan both in the courtroom and on Truth Social, where he wrote that the now octogenarian jurist is a “seething and hostile Clinton-appointed Judge.” The president added: “He is abusive, rude, and obviously not impartial but, that’s the way this crooked system works!” He also said the judge “should be sanctioned for his abuse of power — No wonder our Country is going to Hell!” He told reporters that Judge Kaplan is a “nasty man.”

Ms. Carroll has yet to collect a dime of the jury awards, but she is now a best-selling author. Her new book, “Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President,” borrows from a remark Mr. Trump made about her — that she was “not my type.” The book has spent three weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, climbing as high as second place in the nonfiction category. Ms. Carroll was for 27 years a sex advice columnist at Elle magazine, dispensing counsel in her “Ask E. Jean” column.

A description provided by the book’s publisher, St. Martin’s Press, explains, “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?”

The book promises to put readers “in a better seat than the jury box” and “in on the choosing of the ‘clothes for court,’ and the creation of ‘the look’: a look that will help the jury connect the younger E. Jean who is attacked by Trump in Bergdorf’s with the older E. Jean who sits in the courtroom.”