The Supreme Court closed the book on Donald Trump’s E. Jean Carroll case on Monday, denying his petition for a rehearing and leaving in place a $5 million jury verdict he has already paid in full. The order landed on the Court’s summer order list with no explanation, no reasoning and not a single noted dissent.
What the Court Actually Did
Monday’s order in Trump v. Carroll, No. 25-573, was not a ruling on the merits. The justices did not say Trump was right or wrong, and they did not endorse or reject a single argument in his petition. They simply declined to reconsider a decision they had already made.
That earlier decision came on June 29, 2026, when the Court denied Trump’s petition for certiorari outright. He filed a petition for rehearing on July 8. Monday’s order refuses to revisit that refusal. It is the second time the Court has declined to touch this case, and it is the last procedural step available to him.
Rehearing petitions are among the longest shots in American law. They ask the justices to admit they got something wrong and start over, and they almost never succeed. SCOTUSblog notes that the last time the Court granted one was in 2018.
How the Case Got Here
On May 9, 2023, a Manhattan federal jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1996, and for defaming her when he publicly denied the encounter in October 2022. The jury awarded $5 million.
The jury’s finding was sexual abuse as defined under New York law. It did not return a finding of rape under that statute, though the trial judge later wrote that the conduct the jury found met the common understanding of the word.
The Second Circuit affirmed the verdict on December 30, 2024. Trump filed his petition for review at the Supreme Court in November 2025. The justices relisted it repeatedly, carrying it from a February 20, 2026 conference all the way to a June 25 conference before denying it four days later.
The Money Was Already Gone
Here is the detail that gets lost in the headlines: Carroll has had the money for over a month. A total of $5,625,005.48 – the $5 million award plus roughly three years of post-judgment interest – was disbursed from court escrow on July 9, 2026 and landed in the account of Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, by July 13.
Trump paid before his final appeal died. Monday’s order did not create a new obligation. It closed the door on any possibility of getting the money back.
Trump’s Final Argument
The rehearing petition rested on presidential immunity. Trump’s lawyers argued that two statements issued from the White House in 2019, which were used as evidence at trial, were protected official acts of a sitting president and should never have reached a jury. The justices were unmoved, and they said nothing about why.
This Is Not the End of Carroll v. Trump
A separate and far larger judgment is still live. In January 2024, a second jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in a defamation case, a verdict the Second Circuit affirmed in September 2025. Trump and the Justice Department filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to take that case on July 28, 2026. The justices are expected to consider it in the fall.
What This Means for Americans
A jury of ordinary citizens heard the evidence, believed the woman, and assigned a price. Every appeal since has been an attempt to make that verdict disappear, and every court along the way has declined to make it disappear. The system moved slowly, but it held. For anyone who has watched wealth and power routinely outlast accountability, that is the story here: a civil jury verdict against the most powerful man in the country survived three years of appeals, and the money is in the plaintiff’s hands.
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