The Supreme Court has closed the last door available to President Donald Trump in the civil case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, declining on Monday to reconsider its own June decision and leaving a $5 million jury verdict permanently in place.The order was brief and offered no explanation. That is standard for the court when it turns away a petition, but the procedural posture here was anything but standard. Trump had filed a petition for rehearing, asking the justices to take a second look at a case they had already refused to hear. Rehearing petitions are rare, and the court almost never grants them. For a litigant who has exhausted every other avenue, it is close to a legal last resort.
Where the verdict came from
The judgment traces back to May 2023, when a federal jury in Manhattan found Trump liable in a civil case for s*xually abusing Carroll at a New York department store in the mid-1990s and for defaming her when he publicly denied her account. The jury awarded her $5 million.An important distinction has followed the case at every stage: this was a civil trial, not a criminal prosecution. The jury was asked to decide liability and damages under a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, not guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. No criminal charges were ever filed, and the verdict carried no prison exposure.Trump has denied Carroll’s allegations from the beginning and has repeatedly characterized the lawsuit as politically motivated.
A long road through the appellate courts
The path from the jury room to Monday’s order was a steady sequence of losses for Trump. He lost at trial. He then lost before a panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the verdict. He asked the full Second Circuit to rehear the case, and that request was denied as well.That left the Supreme Court. In June, the justices declined to take up his appeal. Monday’s order refusing to revisit that decision was the final step.Roberta Kaplan, the attorney who represented Carroll, said after the order came down that Trump now has no remaining options to challenge the verdict.
The money has already changed hands
Unlike many high-profile judgments that linger unpaid through years of appeals, this one has already been satisfied. Carroll was paid more than $5.6 million last month, a figure that reflects the original $5 million award plus post-judgment interest that accrued while the appeals worked their way through the system.That detail changes the practical stakes of Monday’s order. The ruling does not trigger a payment; it forecloses any possibility of getting the money back.
One case is over. Another is not.
The $5 million verdict is not the only judgment Carroll holds. In a separate federal defamation case, a different jury awarded her $83.3 million in January 2024 over statements Trump made about her. That award dwarfs the one finalized this week.Trump has asked the Supreme Court to overturn that second verdict as well. The justices have not announced whether they will hear it. Until they do, the larger of the two judgments remains an open question, and the legal fight between Trump and Carroll is not fully resolved.
Why this order matters
Monday’s decision is significant less for what it says than for what it ends. A sitting president spent nearly three years pursuing every available appellate remedy against a civil jury verdict, and the judicial system returned the same answer at each level. The Supreme Court’s refusal to revisit its own denial is the point at which that process runs out of steps.For Carroll, it means a verdict reached by twelve jurors in Manhattan now stands as final. For the courts, it is a reminder that the ordinary rules of civil litigation, including the finality of a jury’s judgment, apply regardless of who the defendant is.The remaining $83.3 million question is now the only part of this dispute still in play.