Supreme Court leaves Trump’s $5 million Carroll defamation judgment intact

The Supreme Court refused to hear Donald Trump’s appeal on Monday, leaving intact a $5 million civil judgment for E. Jean Carroll and locking in the 2023 jury verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The brief order gave no explanation and noted no dissents.

The case began in federal court in Manhattan in 2022, when Carroll said Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996 and then defamed her after she went public in 2019. In a 2022 social-media post, Trump described her claims as a “hoax” and a “con job,” language that became central to the lawsuit and the later damages award.

Jurors in 2023 found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but they did not find that he raped Carroll. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that verdict in 2024, and the Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene now leaves the judgment in place. Carroll’s lawyers had argued that the evidence at trial supported the outcome and that any dispute over trial rulings would not have changed the result.

Trump’s lawyers had asked the justices to review whether Manhattan federal Judge Lewis Kaplan wrongly allowed jurors to hear testimony from other women, including Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, who accused Trump of sexual misconduct. They also challenged the admission of the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by the genitals. The high court’s decision ends that effort without any explanation from the justices.

The ruling leaves Trump facing more than one major Carroll judgment. Carroll has also won a separate defamation award of $83.3 million, bringing her total jury awards to more than $88 million. That second case is still on a different track and has not yet reached the Supreme Court.

Trump has continued to deny all allegations. For now, the legal effect of the Monday order is clear: the $5 million Carroll judgment survives, the appellate record remains intact, and Trump’s path to undoing the first verdict has narrowed sharply.