E. Jean Carroll demands Donald Trump immediately pay $5.8 million after the Supreme Court rejected his appeal.
Writer E. Jean Carroll has formally asked a federal judge to order Donald Trump to pay nearly $5.8 million in damages, marking a major turning point in a multi-year legal battle. The high-stakes request was filed in a Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, just one day after the United States Supreme Court officially declined to hear the president’s appeal to overturn the underlying verdict. According to legal documents, the original $5 million penalty has grown significantly due to accumulated interest. Carroll’s legal team stated that while they had previously cooperated with Trump’s requests to pause payments during the appeals process, that patience has run out because his options in the federal court system are effectively exhausted.
To understand why this is happening now, it helps to look back at the origins of the case. In May 2023, a New York civil jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room during the 1990s. The jury also found him liable for defamation because he later branded her accusations a “hoax” and a “con job” on social media. Because this was a civil lawsuit rather than a criminal trial, the penalty is purely financial rather than prison time. Trump has consistently denied the allegations, maintaining his innocence and arguing that the trial process was inherently unfair.
The immediate trigger for this week’s escalating legal drama was the Supreme Court’s decisive action on Monday. The nation’s highest court issued a brief, unexplained order rejecting Trump’s bid to throw out the 2023 verdict. Trump’s defense attorneys had argued that the original trial was tainted by highly inflammatory evidence, including testimonies from other women who made similar historical accusations against him. However, the Supreme Court justices expressed no division and simply chose to leave the lower court’s ruling completely intact.
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Moments after the Supreme Court’s decision went public, Trump reacted on social media, promising to continue fighting what he labeled a “weaponization and lawfare case.” Almost simultaneously, his legal team reached out to Carroll’s lawyers, asking for yet another delay so they could request the Supreme Court to reconsider its denial. Carroll’s lead attorney, Roberta Kaplan, flatly refused the request. She filed an immediate motion asking U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to accelerate the timeline and order the immediate disbursement of the funds currently held in an escrow court account.
On Wednesday, Judge Kaplan fast-tracked the issue, ordering Trump’s legal team to file a formal response by July 7. Carroll’s lawyers emphasized that after four years of intense litigation moving through every single level of the American judiciary, the case must finally come to a close. They argued there is no legal justification to hold up the money any longer.
This specific $5.8 million dispute is only part of Trump’s broader legal exposure regarding Carroll. In a separate January 2024 defamation trial focusing on comments Trump made while serving his first presidential term in 2019, a different Manhattan jury awarded Carroll an additional $83.3 million. That larger judgment is still working its way through the appeals process, meaning this current fight over the millions is just the first wave of payouts Carroll is actively pursuing.
