The Supreme Court of the United States refused today to review an appeal by the US President, upholding a ruling that orders Donald Trump to pay five million dollars to writer E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse and defamation.
The decision to maintain the five million dollar (approximately 4.4 million euro) penalty was issued without comment and with no recorded dissents, leaving intact the verdict delivered in 2023 and subsequently affirmed by a federal appeals court.
The courts rejected the arguments put forward by Trump’s defense, which claimed that irregularities had occurred during the trial that were capable of influencing the outcome of the case.
The case originated from allegations made by Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, who stated in an excerpt from her memoir that she had been sexually assaulted by Trump in a New York department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
Read more: Trump attends rape defamation case in New York
The former businessman and current US President has always denied the allegations, characterizing them on social media in 2022 as “a hoax” and “a scam.”
In the appeal to the Supreme Court, Trump’s lawyers argued that the trial was compromised by the admission of testimony from two other women who also accused him of decades-old sexual assaults. They also challenged what they claimed was an incorrect application of federal rules regarding the admissibility of evidence.
In a separate lawsuit, the courts also previously upheld an 83.3 million dollar (approximately 72 million euro) defamation judgment stemming from public statements made by Trump in 2019, in which he publicly denied the writer’s accusations.
