Left: Former magazine columnist, E. Jean Carroll, center, enters a vehicle outside of Manhattan federal court following the verdict in her second defamation trial against former U.S. president, Donald Trump. (Jimin Kim / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images). Right: President Donald Trump leaves his apartment building, Friday, Jan 26, 2024, in New York (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura).
The U.S. Supreme Court has effectively ended President Donald Trump's effort to overturn a ruling that found he had sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in a New York City dressing room in the 1990s and later defamed her.
As Law&Crime previously reported, a jury found in 2023 that Trump had sexually abused Carroll in the dressing room of department store Bergdorf Goodman sometime in the late 1990s, and then defamed her when, as president, he denied the allegations, insisting that he had never met her. The president has spent the intervening years unsuccessfully appealing the $5 million verdict, arguing that U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan "erred" in allowing evidence, by way of testimony, of other assault accusations.
On Monday, the justices denied taking up the case, unceremoniously listing the matter with dozens of others under the heading "Certiorari Denied" without any explanation or writing from the court.
Trump had argued that Kaplan should not have allowed jurors to hear testimony from Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, who said that Trump had sexually assaulted them. Leeds had described in a deposition Trump's alleged sexual assault of her on an airplane in the 1970s. Stoynoff, a writer and journalist, alleged that Trump had assaulted her in 2005 when she was at Mar-a-Lago to interview him and his wife, Melania Trump.
Trump had also opposed Kaplan's decision to allow jurors to consider the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape, in which Trump is heard making lewd comments about grabbing women in a hot-mic exchange with then-host Billy Bush.
Carroll's lawyers had argued that even if Kaplan had erred in allowing the evidence, "any such error would have been harmless" in light of the strength of Carroll's case, noting that the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that no "claimed error or combination of errors in the district court's evidentiary rulings affected Mr. Trump's substantial rights."
Despite Trump's denials that he had ever met Carroll, he was photographed with Carroll at a party, with their then-spouses Ivana Trump and John Johnson. In a deposition, the former president famously confused Carroll in that picture with his ex-wife, Marla Maples.
Donald Trump, E. Jean Carroll, Carroll's then-husband John Johnson, and Trump's then-wife Ivana Trump meeting at a party in 1987 (photo included in Carroll's complaint).
A second defamation case brought by Carroll, which resulted in the $83 million judgment, was filed after Trump, in 2019, continued to call Carroll a liar and denied knowing her. The presiding judge in that case determined that because a jury had previously found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, it was an established fact for the purpose of the second trial and he therefore made his defamatory statements with actual malice.
Trump has continued to appeal that case.
Matt Naham and Adam Klasfeld contributed to this report.