US Supreme Court again rejects Trump’s request to overturn sex assault judgement

Supreme Court Leaves Carroll Verdict Intact as Trump’s Second Appeal Fails

Usagevpn.com – The highest court in the United States has once again declined to intervene in the landmark civil case between former journalist E. Jean Carroll and President Donald Trump, effectively locking in a jury’s finding that the president sexually assaulted her and subsequently defamed her. The decision, issued without explanation, marks the second occasion on which the Court has turned away Trump’s bid to reverse damages awarded in Carroll’s favor.

A Second Door Closed Without Comment

In July of this year, Trump’s legal team, working alongside the Department of Justice, filed a petition asking the nine justices to vacate an $83 million (€71 million) defamation verdict that Carroll had secured in New York state court. The Court’s refusal to grant certiorari means the lower-court judgment stands as final. Notably, the justices offered no written rationale for their inaction — a practice consistent with the Court’s long-standing convention of denying most petitions in brief orders rather than full opinions. Roughly 7,000 to 8,000 cert petitions arrive each term, and fewer than one hundred receive a hearing, so silence from the bench is statistically ordinary. Yet in this instance the silence carries extraordinary weight, because it forecloses the last avenue available to Trump for unwinding the verdict.

From Memoir to Courtroom: How the Case Took Shape

The dispute traces its origins to a 1996 incident. According to Carroll’s account, she was fitting for a dress in a department-store dressing room when Trump, who was shopping nearby, entered the room and assaulted her. She kept the matter private for more than two decades before publishing her memoir What Do We Know? in 2019, which brought the allegation into national conversation for the first time.

Trump responded not with a simple denial but with pointed public remarks suggesting Carroll had invented the story to generate publicity for her book. He told reporters he had never met her and added, in words that would later become central to the litigation:

“She’s not my type.”

Those comments, along with other statements dismissing the allegation as fabricated, formed the backbone of Carroll’s defamation claim. She argued that Trump’s public denials were not merely opinions but assertions of fact — that he had never been in the dressing room, never touched her — and that those assertions were false and damaging to her professional reputation.

Two Juries, Two Verdicts

Carroll took her case to New York state court and testified before juries on two separate occasions. In the first trial, a jury found in her favor on the sexual-assault claim and awarded damages. In the second proceeding, a different jury focused on the defamation count and returned a verdict of $83 million (€71 million), a figure that included both compensatory and punitive components. Last month, following the civil jury’s determination that Trump had both assaulted and defamed her, he paid Carroll $5.6 million (€4.8 million) — a sum reflecting the court-ordered award after adjustments and interest calculations.

Trump has maintained throughout the entire litigation that no wrongdoing occurred. His attorneys have characterized the verdicts as products of an overzealous jury and have pressed the Supreme Court twice to intervene. The first petition was denied; the second, filed in July alongside the Justice Department’s participation, has now met the same fate.

Why the Silence Matters

The absence of a written opinion does not mean the justices found the case unimportant. It means they saw no need to create new precedent or to resolve a circuit split — the two principal reasons the Court typically agrees to hear a case. By declining, the Court has signaled that the existing body of New York defamation and personal-injury law was sufficient to resolve the dispute at the trial level. For Carroll, that signal is a form of validation: the highest tribunal in the land has looked at the record and decided there is nothing to correct.

For observers of American civil procedure, the episode also underscores a structural reality. Once a state-court judgment passes through the state’s appellate system and a cert petition to the US Supreme Court is denied, the matter is effectively closed. There is no further appellate step. The $83 million figure, the $5.6 million payment, and the jury’s factual findings are now settled matters of public record.

Broader Implications

The case has drawn sustained attention because it pits a sitting president’s public statements against a private citizen’s right to pursue civil remedies. Critics of the outcome have noted that the president’s ability to shape the national narrative through social media and press briefings gave his denials an amplification that a typical defendant’s remarks would never achieve, potentially magnifying the reputational harm Carroll alleged. Supporters of Trump, meanwhile, have pointed to the extraordinary length of the litigation and the political dimensions of the case as reasons the Supreme Court should have reviewed the verdict. The Court, however, has now spoken — or rather, has chosen not to speak — twice.

With both appeals exhausted, the Carroll matter moves from the realm of active litigation into the realm of settled history. The verdicts, the testimony, the payments, and the two denials by the Supreme Court together constitute the final chapter of a case that began in a department-store dressing room in 1996 and ended, at last, in the quiet of a closed courthouse door.