The US Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear President Donald Trump’s bid to overturn a $5 million verdict in favor of E. Jean Carroll in a case in which a jury found him liable for sexually abusing the former magazine columnist and then defaming her.
Background
Trump has been battling Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, ever since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019 in which she alleged that Trump had sexually abused her in around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan. Trump denied Carroll’s claims and asserted that she lied about the accusations both in 2019 while he was still serving his first term as president, and again in 2022 when he was out of office.
Carroll sued Trump in federal court in Manhattan. Jurors in 2023 decided that Trump had sexually abused Carroll and defamed her, awarding $5 million in damages. They did not find that Trump raped Carroll, as she had claimed.
Trump’s lawyers told the Supreme Court that the trial judge “erroneously allowed testimony about multiple decades-old, unverified and unrelated allegations to be presented to the jury,” flouting federal rules governing the admission of evidence in a case.
Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
