Carroll’s attorneys filed papers in Manhattan federal court Tuesday demanding President Donald Trump pay a $5 million civil jury verdict, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined Monday to hear his appeal of the 2023 case.
The jury award has grown to nearly $5.8 million with accrued interest. Carroll’s legal team said Trump resumed making defamatory statements about their client even as his lawyers sought yet another delay on the payment.
“To date, Carroll has agreed to each of Defendant’s many requests to delay the payment he owes her,” attorneys Roberta Kaplan, D. Brandon Trice, and Maximilian T. Crema wrote in the Tuesday filing. “Given the extraordinary lengths he has taken to avoid such payments and that each of those efforts has been denied in full, that cooperation ends today. It is time for him to pay Carroll.”
The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s petition without noted dissent. Within minutes of the decision becoming public, Trump posted on social media calling the case a “Weaponization and Lawfare Case” and vowed to keep fighting. His legal team then contacted Carroll’s attorneys asking that the payout be held while they petitioned the high court to reconsider. Carroll’s lawyers rejected that request and filed the court papers the following day.
The $5 million verdict came from a 2023 civil trial that Trump did not attend. Carroll, 82, testified that Trump sexually abused her in the spring of 1996 in a changing room at a midtown Manhattan luxury department store. The jury found in her favor on both the sexual abuse and defamation claims.
Carroll first described the alleged encounter publicly in 2019, while Trump was serving his first term in office. Trump has repeatedly denied knowing Carroll, accused her of fabricating the allegation to promote a book she published around that time, and characterized all related litigation as politically motivated.
A separate trial in January 2024 resulted in a second verdict against Trump. A Manhattan jury awarded Carroll $83 million in defamation damages at that proceeding, during which Trump briefly testified. That award remains under appeal.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who presided over both trials and is unrelated to Carroll’s lead attorney Roberta Kaplan, instructed the 2024 jury to accept the factual findings from the earlier trial and decide only the dollar amount Trump owed for statements he made about Carroll during his presidency.
