President Donald Trump has been shut out at the nation’s highest court once more, this time in his bid to undo a verdict finding him liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996. The Supreme Court on August 17, 2026, refused to reconsider his appeal of the case, closing out a legal fight that has run for years and has already cost him $5.6 million.
What the justices issued was a single sentence — no reasoning attached, no dissents recorded. A case that began with a 2019 accusation and traveled all the way to Washington, D.C., was effectively finished with a rejection at the top.
A Rehearing the Court Rarely Grants
Trump had already made this trip. On June 29, the justices declined to take up the case. Rather than let that stand as the end of it, he went back and petitioned for reconsideration — a maneuver that is a long shot no matter how it is measured.
The court almost never grants rehearings. They are set aside for exceptional circumstances that seldom come along. Even so, Trump’s legal team pressed the justices to revisit their earlier refusal, looking for traction that earlier efforts had not produced.
Legal observers had every reason to expect what arrived on August 17: a one-sentence order turning the request down, offered without comment and without any noted dissents. On this front, no further appeals are possible.
Behind the petition was a jury’s conclusion that Trump was liable for sexual abuse and defamation, along with an order that he pay Carroll $5 million. That verdict now stands unshaken with the rehearing denied.
How the Case Began
The allegations became public in 2019, when Carroll, an advice columnist, described them in her book, “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal.” The encounter, she said, took place in 1996 at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury department store in New York City.
Carroll alleged that Trump forced her against a dressing room wall, held her in place and raped her. He has consistently denied the accusations, saying in an interview that Carroll was “not my type” and claiming he’d never met her — a denial complicated by photographs showing the two of them together.
Two separate legal tracks followed. Carroll sued Trump for defamation in 2019, then filed a second suit in 2022 accusing him of battery and defamation under New York’s Adult Survivors Act. The one-year lookback window that law created allowed survivors of sexual abuse to bring claims otherwise barred by the statute of limitations, opening a path Carroll would not have had under ordinary timelines.
The Verdict Stands
By any reading, the rehearing push was a last-ditch effort — and by August the money was already gone. After the June 29 denial, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan found that Trump had exhausted the appellate process and ordered him to pay. Carroll received roughly $5.625 million on July 9 — the $5 million jury award plus three years of accumulated interest.
That is what made the rehearing petition more than a formality. On July 22, Trump’s lawyers filed an emergency request asking an appellate court to order the money returned to escrow, a bid that depended on the Supreme Court agreeing to look at the case again. The August 17 order ended that possibility. Both the payment and the finding of liability were left intact.
Carroll went public in 2019 with allegations that reshaped a national conversation, and the denial marks the end of a journey that carried her from the pages of a memoir into a federal courtroom and on to the Supreme Court. Orders of this kind rarely carry reasoning, and with no dissent noted twice in seven weeks, the justices showed no appetite for revisiting a matter they had already turned away.
One track of the Carroll litigation is still live. In Carroll’s first defamation suit, filed in 2019 over remarks Trump made that year while he was president, a separate jury returned an $83.3 million verdict in January 2024. On July 28 he and the Justice Department asked the justices to hear an appeal of that award, arguing that presidential immunity shields statements he made in office. That petition is still pending.