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On Monday, the Supreme Court declined President Donald Trump’s request to review a 2023 verdict that found him liable for sexually assaulting and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump is legally required to pay Carroll the $5 million, as directed in 2023.
On his Truth Social account, Trump posted, “Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me by a woman I never met,” and called the defamation case “ridiculous.”
Trump had asked the Supreme Court to review and overturn the case in 2025.
Two previous courts have ruled against Trump in this case, finding the president liable for sexual assault and defamation.
Carroll, a former columnist for Elle Magazine, published a memoir in 2019 that described Trump sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in Manhattan in the 1990s. Trump denied the account. But in 2022, the New York Adult Survivors Act went into effect, which granted adult survivors of sexual violence a one-year window to sue abusers regardless of how long ago abuse had occurred. Carroll was one of the first to use this Act – to sue Trump. A New York jury unanimously found Trump responsible for sexual abuse and defamation, even after Trump’s lawyer grilled Carroll on her recollection of the events, her social media posts, and her income. She was awarded $5 million.
When Trump continued to smear Carroll and rile up his followers, who escalated with threats against her, she sued him again for defamation. Another jury unanimously found Trump guilty of defamation in January 2024 and awarded Carroll $83.3 million – though she has not yet received that money, either.
When asking the Supreme Court to overturn the 2023 verdict, Trump’s attorneys argued that the president has “absolute immunity” for the comments he makes as president — meaning, comments that smeared Carroll or claimed he did not know her. The Department of Justice also supported Trump, attempting to intervene through multiple mechanisms to shut down the lawsuit before reversing course under President Joe Biden.
On Monday, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan issued a statement in response to the court’s decision, saying, “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,” Kaplan said.
On Monday, the Supreme Court also declined to take up lawyer and former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz’s $300 million defamation lawsuit against CNN from 2020. Dershowitz claimed that the network had intentionally distorted his defense of Trump during his 2020 impeachment trial. In 2023, a federal district court ruled in favor of CNN, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit stated the same in 2025.
In the 2025 decision, the court said that CNN provided “unrefuted evidence” that its commentators believed their statements about Dershowitz were “fair and accurate,” and that Dershowitz “provided no evidence that CNN’s commentators or producers acted with actual malice.”
Dershowitz, who served as a defense attorney for sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and whose name appears numerous times in the Epstein files, claimed in his lawsuit that protections in the courts have left the media nearly “untouchable.” His case aimed to revisit and alter a 1964 verdict that set a high bar for public figures to win defamation lawsuits against media companies. This comes as the Trump administration has repeatedly attacked the mainstream media and attempted to restrict its coverage.
Though these two decisions were a loss for Trump, the majority of Supreme Court cases released this month have been a boon to Trump, attacking legal migration and Temporary Protected Status, among others. Tuesday, June 30 is expected to see rulings on birthright citizenship and transgender athletes.
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