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 declined to give President Donald Trump a rehearing in his case against E. Jean Carroll, leaving a $5 million judgment against the president liable for sexual abuse and defamation undisturbed.
The high court's orders list included few recognizable cases and jettisoned Trump's petition for rehearing without explanation on Monday, roughly one month after the court flatly denied his initial petition for a writ of certiorari.
Thereafter, Trump's attorneys complained that Carroll placed the $5 million-plus into a retirement account, rather than a "secure arrangement." Carroll's move was a "bait-and-switch […] to resist judicial intervention" as the president simultaneously appeals — on immunity grounds — the separate $83 million defamation judgment the plaintiff won (the "Carroll I" case), according to the James Otis Law Group.
"That use of official Presidential statements matters, because this Court has made clear that official Presidential acts may not be used as evidence to impose liability for other conduct," the petition for rehearing said. "The forthcoming Carroll I petition bears on a related constitutional reason why evidence used at the Carroll II trial—the 2019 official Presidential statements—could not properly have been used to impose liability."
While Trump's team urged the Supreme Court to vacate its decision not to grant his petition, the justices did nothing to change the status quo on Monday, only saying that the rehearing was denied.
In late July, the president's lawyers filed their other petition attacking the $83 million defamation judgment, asserting that "[t]his Court's intervention is necessary."
The Carroll I jury, Trump claimed, was "improperly invited to punish a President more severely than a private citizen, because he had 'used the office of the presidency' to commit the alleged tort," defamation, when he called Carroll's rape accusation a politically and financially motivated lie or "hoax" backed by Democrats.
The president has repeatedly said that he "never met" Carroll, and that a photo of him meeting her in 1987 at a party "doesn't count!"