Despite last-minute protests from lawyers for President Trump, a federal judge has ordered the court to release $5 million, plus interest, that writer E. Jean Carroll won when a civil jury in 2023 found Mr. Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
The money was held in a court-controlled bank account for three years, and Mr. Trump said in recent filings that he wanted it to stay there.
It is unclear when exactly the funds will be transferred. Mr Trump’s lawyers immediately appealed the judge’s order. Mr. Trump requested an urgent stay of the order on Wednesday, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit quickly rejected his request.
Carroll and her lawyers have been seeking the money in the days since the Supreme Court refused to hear Mr. Trump’s appeal in the case on June 29 apparently put the matter to rest. But Mr. Trump has asked the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision, arguing in a filing Tuesday night that the lower-level federal judge who presided over the case should delay paying out the money Carroll won until the Supreme Court weighs in again.
For her part, Carroll has requested and been granted by the judge a faster timeline than usual to receive the $5 million in damages the jury awarded her, plus hundreds of thousands in interest, accrued since the case was decided in 2023.
Her lawyer Roberta Kaplan called Trump’s recent efforts at the Supreme Court a “gimmick” and accused the president of trying to “buy time so he can try to find a new basis to delay paying Carroll.”
In a memorandum explaining Wednesday’s decision, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that Mr. Trump “has been dragging out this case for years” and concluded: “It is time for him to ‘do justice’ and pay the judgment.”
The judge also noted how unusual it would be for the Supreme Court to reconsider a matter it had just rejected, saying successful motions to reopen were “extremely rare birds.”
Mr. Trump vowed to resist paying Carroll shortly after a unanimous federal jury concluded in less than three hours that he most likely sexually abused Carroll by forcibly inserting his fingers into her during an encounter at a department store in the 1990s. Mr. Trump has strongly denied her allegations since they were first made in 2019.
His denials, including claims that he did not know Carroll, that Carroll was “not my type” and calling her story a “hoax” and a “hoax,” are crucial to her defamation claims.
In 2024, Carroll won a separate defamation case against Mr. Trump, which also involved his repeated denials that he had abused her. In that case, the jury awarded Carroll more than $83 million.
Mr. Trump has also asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the case, and this week, in asking it to reconsider its decision on the $5 million trial in 2023, he said he believed constitutional claims in the second matter would overlap with the first.
The arguments the Supreme Court refused to hear in the $5 million case centered on whether the judge had admitted inadmissible evidence. In the $83 million case, Mr. Trump argues that presidential immunity should have prevented certain defamatory statements made during Mr. Trump’s first term from being shown to the jury.
The Supreme Court has not commented on Mr. Trump’s latest efforts.
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