E. Jean Carroll Beat Trump. Again.
As the cowards in Congress prostrate themselves, an 82-year-old woman took on the president and won.
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On Monday, the Supreme Court denied Trump’s petition for certiorari in Trump v. Carroll with no noted dissents.
The 2023 jury verdict finding that Trump sexually abused and defamed advice columnist E. Jean Carroll is now final. The president is out of courts to shop this to, and he’ll get no more appeals. And since he had to prepay the judgment and deposit it with the court — along with interest! — Carroll won’t have to wait for him to cut the check.
Courtroom crazytimes
There were actually two Carroll v. Trump cases, and confusingly Carroll II went to trial first.
The first lawsuit was filed in 2019, after New York Magazine published an excerpt of Carroll’s book “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal,” in which she described being sexually assaulted in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s by the sitting president.
Trump went berserk, spewing a tirade of revolting abuse and accusing her of concocting the story with the help of prominent Democrats.
“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, okay?” he sneered.
His followers barraged Carroll with threats and harassment, and she lost her longtime gig at Elle magazine. On the witness stand, she described the avalanche of hate every time Trump tweeted about her:
Just a wave of slime. It was very seedy comments, very denigrating. Almost an endless stream of people repeating what Donald Trump says, I was a liar and I was in it for the money, can't wait for the payoff, working for the democrats, over and over. But the main thing was “way too ugly.” It is very hard to get up in the morning and face the fact that you're receiving these messages you are just too ugly to go on living, practically.
Carroll sued for defamation in New York state court in 2019, but, immediately after the judge ordered Trump to submit to a DNA test, Attorney General Bill Barr swooped in to substitute the federal government as the defendant in Carroll I under the Westfall Act. That law protects federal employees from liability for torts committed in the course of their official duties. And because you can’t sue the government for defamation, swapping in the United States as defendant would have meant the end of the case.
But Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York ruled that Trump had not been doing official president stuff when he said Carroll was “not my type” and implied she was too unattractive to assault. Then Trump spent the next two years arguing the point in multiple courts, only to find himself back in front of Judge Kaplan with the same answer in 2023. By that point the president and his lawyer Alina Habba had thoroughly pissed off Judge Kaplan with their antics and would probably have been delighted to find themselves back in state court. But because federal removal under the Westfall Act is permanent, they were stuck.
In the meantime, Trump continued to spew bile about Carroll, even after he left office.
And in 2022, New York passed the Adult Survivors Act, a one-year window for adult victims of sexual abuse whose civil suits would otherwise be barred by statutes of limitation to sue. On Thanksgiving 2022, the very day the law went into effect, Carroll filed her second suit, alleging defamation and sexual abuse under the ASA.
That case, Carroll II, went to trial in the spring of 2023. After weighing testimony from two other women who’d separately accused Trump of sexual assault, the Access Hollywood tape, and Trump’s own videotaped depositions, the jurors found that Trump sexually abused Carroll and defamed her when he denied it. They awarded her $5 million in damages.
Because the Carroll II jury had already concluded that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll and that his prior comments about her were defamatory, those issues were not relitigated when Carroll I went to trial in 2024 — they were the “law of the case.” Functionally the only issue was how much money it would take to make Trump stop defaming Carroll — something he’d shown himself disinclined to do when the price tag was $5 million. The Carroll I jury returned an $83.3 million verdict, which is still on appeal over the same presidential immunity arguments that stalled it in the first place.
The Second Circuit panel affirmed the $5 million verdict from Carroll II, finding no abuse of discretion in any of the trial court’s rulings. The full Second Circuit declined to rehear the case en banc. And now the Supreme Court has declined to touch it, too — an important victory since overturning Carroll II would similarly undo Carroll I, which relied on the first jury’s conclusions of fact and law.
Pay up, asshole
Trump famously stiffs his creditors, and so it’s rational to worry that he might try to do the same here. But it would be terrible public policy to allow the losing party to spend years forcing the winner to litigate appeals, and then refuse to pay the judgment in the end. And so courts give the loser a choice: pay up immediately, or post cash or a bond equal to the judgment plus interest, to be held by the court itself pending appeal.
Back in June 2023, Trump deposited $5,550,000 directly into the court’s own registry instead of buying a bond from a surety company. The parties stipulated that:
After the latest of (a) the mandate issued by the Second Circuit in connection with the Appeal; (b) a denial of a timely filed petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court (if any) in connection with the Appeal; or (c) upon the Supreme Court' s granting of certiorari, an order of the Supreme Court in connection with the Appeal, Plaintiff may collect any moneys owed by Defendant to Plaintiff under the terms of the Judgment, as may be modified on appeal or court order, from the amount deposited with the Court by Defendant, inclusive of any interest earned on such funds less any fees;
Judge Kaplan signed off on this agreement, and option (b) has now come to pass. And yet … Trump says he doesn’t want to pay.
Within minutes of this post, Trump’s lawyers called their counterparts to ask whether Carroll would agree to yet another stay to allow Trump to petition the Supreme Court to reconsider its own denial of certiorari. The Court is now in recess and won’t have another conference until September 28, so this is request for Carroll to agree to wait at least 90 days (and possibly as much as a year) to get her money.
After they quit laughing, Carroll’s team declined and asked if Trump would just stipulate to releasing the cash, saving them all the cost of another round of pointless briefing when the result is foreordained. Trump’s counsel responded they couldn’t even give her an answer until Thursday, July 2.
At this point, Carroll’s lawyers have been dealing with Trump’s bad faith delay tactics for seven years, so they didn’t wait to be jerked around by Trump’s minions going into a three-day holiday weekend.
“At every step here (and Carroll’s related case against him), Defendant Trump has engaged in ‘litigation tactics [that] have had a dilatory effect and, indeed, strongly suggest that he is acting out of a strong desire to delay’ in this case,” her lawyers wrote to the court Tuesday, citing the judge’s prior rulings against Trump in this case. Carroll asked the court to release the $5.78 million, including $779,783 in post-judgment interest that’s piled up since 2023, and points out that the Supreme Court’s own rules say a cert denial isn’t paused while a rehearing petition is pending.
“Because the Supreme Court has now denied certiorari, Carroll is now entitled to disbursement of the funds necessary to satisfy the Judgment, including post-judgment interest,” they continued. “Defendant Trump’s suggestion that he intends to seek rehearing from the Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari does not change the result.”
Judge Kaplan, who has also been dealing with Trump’s bad faith delays for seven years, immediately granted Carroll’s request to expedite briefing on Trump’s final, pointless effort to avoid paying what he owes.
The win is the win
This week the Supreme Court did a lot of terrible things that will weaken the country and enable wholesale corruption of the government. Those conservative justices may yet blow up Carroll I by claiming that the president has an official duty to comment on news of the day by saying that a woman he assaulted is “not my type.” But that won’t change what happened this week.
As Republican politicians cower in fear, abandoning every principle they ever claimed to hold dear out of fear that Trump will use his cult-like hold over his voters to push them out of office, one incredibly brave woman stood up to the man who assaulted her. She did this with full knowledge that he would use every bit of firepower he could muster to destroy her.
And she won.
Donald Trump has been adjudicated, finally and forever, as a man who sexually abused E. Jean Carroll and then lied about it for years. And he’s about to have to pay for it.
That’s it for today
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I apologize for this edition going out later than normal -- there was a technical error with scheduling it that was my fault!
Love it, Liz! Thank you for this stellar read.