Trump denied Supreme Court review in E. Jean Carroll sexual assault case 

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court refused on Monday to review a New York civil case finding that President Donald Trump sexually abused magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in an upscale Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.

Trump asked the justices to review whether several evidentiary rulings at trial should invalidate a $5 million judgment against him for defaming and sexually abusing Carroll. He claimed the trial court improperly admitted “highly inflammatory propensity evidence” against him.

“These ‘striking departures’ from the federal rules of evidence erroneously allowed testimony about multiple decadesold, unverified, and unrelated allegations to be presented to the jury,” Trump wrote in a petition to the court. “As a result, ‘[n]o one can have any confidence that the jury would have returned the same verdict if the normal rules of evidence had been applied.’”

Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, testified at a 2023 trial that Trump turned a friendly run-in at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1996 into a violent rape after they playfully entered the store’s dressing room.

She went public with her story three decades later in 2019, during Trump’s first term as U.S. president, in her book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal,” with an excerpt published in New York Magazine.

She sued three years later, empowered by a new law in the Empire State that opened a small window for adult survivors of sexual assault to seek civil relief for claims otherwise barred by the statute of limitations. In addition to battery, she brought a civil defamation claim pointing to Trump’s broad denials of the rape accusations and his ensuing denigration of her appearance.

At Carroll’s first trial, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan allowed her lawyers to play for jurors the 2005 hot-mic conversation between Trump, who then was hosting “The Apprentice” reality TV show, and “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush.

“When you’re a star they let you do it,” Trump said in the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape that went viral ahead of the 2016 election. “You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.”

Kaplan also allowed two women, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, to testify about unwanted sexual encounters with Trump.

The jury found Trump liable on both counts, awarding Carroll $5 million in damages: $2 million in compensatory damages for Trump sexually abusing her, plus $20,000 in punitive damages; and $1.7 million in damages for a reputation repair program, plus $1 million in other damages on the defamation count.

Carrol was awarded $83.3 million in a second trial that resulted from comments Trump made while in office during his first term after Carroll first made the accusations publicly.

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