The United States Supreme Court once again refuses, and it seems definitively, to erase the serious stain on President Donald Trump’s reputation, whose image will be legally associated with the sexual abuse of writer E. Jean Carroll.
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The highest judicial authority in the United States, controlled by conservative judges (three of whom were appointed by the same president), rejected on Monday, for the second time, to review Trump’s appeal against the conclusion of a jury that he is responsible for sexual abuse and defamation against Carroll. The high court announced the decision in an unsigned order, reiterating its June stance.
In 2023, a federal civil jury determined that Trump had to pay five million dollars in damages to the writer and columnist, after a trial held in New York focused on accusations that in the 1990s he forcibly penetrated her with his fingers in the fitting room of Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury store located right across from Trump Tower in Manhattan, and that he later lied about what happened when she made it public in 2019.
The jury, which made its decision unanimously, concluded that the evidence supported Carroll’s accusations.
After that first Supreme Court ruling in June, Carroll received 5.62 million dollars this summer, an amount that included interest accumulated over the years since the trial was held.
Although that June ruling was considered practically final, Trump’s legal team issued a statement calling the cases presented by Carroll a “Democrat-funded parody of justice” and added that “President Trump will continue to prevail against the political instrumentalization of the judicial system by liberals.” Two months later, the Supreme Court has upheld its ruling.
A second case arising from the writer’s accusations could also reach the Supreme Court. In January 2024, another jury ordered the U.S. president to pay Carroll 83.3 million dollars in damages for defaming her in 2019, after she accused him of having raped her decades earlier.
The Carroll-Trump war is quite complex. But Monday’s decision represents another severe setback for Trump and, this time, it seems it will indeed put an end to his efforts to challenge the verdict that concluded he sexually assaulted Carroll. He will no longer be able to call those who label him a “sexual predator” liars.
The writer and gossip columnist first made her accusations public in 2019 and filed the lawsuit three years later, partly under a New York state law designed to facilitate victims of sexual assaults that occurred years earlier to take legal action, thus eliminating the statute of limitations on such matters.
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Trump always denied the accusations, which is typical of his usual behavior. He called the civil lawsuit a “farce” while questioning the accuser’s character. His lawyers indicated that Carroll never reported the alleged incident to the police and that there were no witnesses, which is also common in this type of crime.
In a filing submitted to the Court, Trump’s lawyers argued that Carroll waited until he was president to file her claims in order to “maximize political damage against him and obtain economic benefit for herself.”
In the appeal, Trump argued that the federal district judge in Manhattan, Lewis Kaplan, should not have allowed the testimony of two other women, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, who had accused Trump of inappropriate sexual conduct. Trump also denied those accusations.
The president’s defenders emphasized that Kaplan also should not have allowed the jurors to see the now-famous Access Hollywood recording, in which Trump is heard making disparaging comments about women.
Overall, his lawyers specified, Judge Kaplan’s decisions to admit evidence not directly related to Carroll’s accusations helped strengthen her case and compensate for the lack of direct evidence about the specific facts alleged.
For their part, the writer’s legal team stressed in their filings that Kaplan acted correctly in admitting that evidence, as it referred to Trump’s alleged prior conduct and his propensity to commit the type of acts she described in her lawsuit.
They also indicated that the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in New York, where the jury verdict was upheld in a ruling issued in 2024, concluded that issues regarding which evidence should be admitted at trial were not a determining factor in upholding the verdict.
The Supreme Court has ignored all allegations to save Trump’s bad reputation.
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