President Donald Trump was mocked on Monday after the Supreme Court shut down his appeal of the E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse verdict, leaving a $5 million judgment against him standing.
In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in a New York department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. They also found he defamed her when he denied it. The verdict carried $5 million in damages, which Carroll can now move to collect.
Legal experts reacted to the major decision, detailing the significance.
"Trump starts today as a loser. E. Jean Carroll wins. The Supreme Court has declined to hear his appeal of her defamation verdict against him. It’s over, and it’s time for him to pay up," Joyce Vance, lawyer and former United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, wrote on X.
"That’s the end of the line for Trump on the Carroll case," Ron Filipkowski, MeidasTouch editor and attorney, wrote on X.
"Roberta Kaplan, attorney for E. Jean Carroll: 'Today's Supreme Court decision affirms once and for all the jury's unanimous verdict that President Donald J. Trump sexually assaulted and defamed E. Jean Carroll. His multiple efforts to appeal that verdict have all failed and today's ruling ends his quest to avoid accountability for his actions,'" Kyle Griffin, executive producer of The Weeknight on MS NOW, wrote on X.
"What this means is that the jury verdict that determined that @realDonaldTrump had sexually abused my friend E. Jean Carroll by penetrating her v----- with his fingers, and therefore had defamed her by denying that he had done so, will stand as a final and conclusive judgment. The highly respected district judge who tried the case, the Hon. Lewis A. Kaplan, correctly stated multiple times that the jury's finding of sexual abuse under New York law meant that, in common parlance and under the law of most jurisdictions, Donald Trump was found to have raped E. Jean. So henceforth and forever more, it will be completely accurate—and utterly inactionable under the common and constitutional law of defamation—to state the following fact: DONALD J. TRUMP IS AN ADJUDICATED RAPIST," George Conway, attorney and Lincoln Project co-founder, wrote on X.