President Donald Trump took urgent court action this week against writer E. Jean Carroll, arguing that her use of a $5 million sexual abuse defamation payout would make the funds “irretrievable.”
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A 2023 jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in 1996 and defaming her when she went public with the allegations, according to the AP.
The jury awarded her $5 million. With interest, the total reached $5.8 million, according to court records. Carroll’s attorneys said that she has invested the funds in a retirement account.
According to court records, the Supreme Court declined to hear Trump’s appeal on June 29. Carroll collected the full amount by July 14.
“Defendant has lost before a jury, the district court, a unanimous Second Circuit panel, the full Second Circuit, en banc, and the Supreme Court of the United States,” wrote in a court filing.
Carroll’s lawyers noted it was Trump’s seventh appeal across two related cases. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said Trump “has been stalling this case for years.”
Trump asked the Supreme Court to reconsider its denial — a procedure that succeeds roughly 0.08% of the time, according to Carroll’s filing. He also asked a federal appeals court to order Carroll to hand the money back.
Her lawyers had previously told the court the money would go into a plain interest-bearing account — but Carroll put it somewhere else.
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“Now that the funds have been released, they are investments for her retirement,” wrote in a July 27 filing.
Trump’s lawyers called that a “bait-and-switch” — she had used the promise of a secure account to block an emergency court order, they argued, then moved the money into stock market investments once it was out of court control.
“That reversal is devastating to Plaintiff’s opposition,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
The funds are now “subject to Plaintiff’s whims,” his lawyers argued, pointing to her “publicly announced plans to distribute money recovered from President Trump to third parties.”
“President Trump faces irreparable harm,” his lawyers wrote, demanding Carroll return the money to the Court Registry Investment System — a secure court-controlled account where it had sat since 2023.
“This extraordinary request is procedurally improper, substantively meritless, and yet another example of Defendant’s pattern of ‘slow-roll[ing] his defenses, asserting or inventing a new one each time his prior effort to delay the case fails,'” fired back.
Trump’s rehearing petition has since been distributed for Supreme Court conference. Carroll asked the appeals court to hold the return-the-money motion until the Supreme Court acts. Trump’s lawyers said the court should rule now.
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