Donald Trump's attempt to appeal a £3.75million sex abuse liability verdict has been rejected by the Supreme Court.
The justices turned away President Trump's appeal after a lower court upheld the 2023 jury verdict and rejected his arguments that the trial was unfair because the judge impermissibly let jurors hear evidence of his alleged past sexual misconduct.
President Trump has been battling magazine columnist EJ Carroll ever since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019.
She alleged that the President had raped her around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.
President Trump has strongly denied Ms Carroll's claims and asserted that she lied about the accusations both in 2019 while he was still serving his first term as president, and again in 2022 once he was out of office.
The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation targeting Ms Carroll, as it has against several other perceived enemies of the Republican president.
The investigation, disclosed in May, was focused on whether Ms Carroll committed perjury in testimony tied to the two civil lawsuits that she won against President Trump.
The case that led to the $5million verdict concerned President Trump's statements in 2022 when he called Carroll's claim a "hoax" and a "con job" in a post on social media, where he added she was "not my type!"
Ms Carroll sued Mr Trump in federal court in Manhattan.
Jurors in 2023 decided that Mr Trump had sexually abused Ms Carroll and defamed her, awarding $5million in damages, but they did not find that he raped Carroll, as she had claimed.
The Manhattan-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in 2024, ruling that evidence established a "repeated, idiosyncratic pattern of conduct" consistent with Ms Carroll's allegations.
Amongst the evidence presented was an infamous leaked video of Mr Trump lewdly bragging about his sexual prowess on "Access Hollywood" that surfaced during the 2016 US presidential campaign.
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Lawyers for the President told the Supreme Court that the trial judge "erroneously allowed testimony about multiple decades-old, unverified and unrelated allegations to be presented to the jury," flouting federal rules governing the admission of evidence in a case.
"Carroll waited more than 20 years to falsely accuse Donald Trump, who she politically opposes, until after he became the 45th President, when she could maximize political injury to him and profit for herself," his lawyers wrote in a filing.
The 2nd Circuit in the other lawsuit Ms Carroll won in 2025 declined to throw out an $83.3million verdict reached by a jury in 2024 for defaming her when Mr Trump first denied her claims in 2019 and asserted that she fabricated the accusations to sell her book.
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