The US Supreme Court declined Monday to accept President Donald Trump's request to review the verdict in a sexual abuse case he lost.
As a result, the lower court ruling ordering Trump to pay $5 million (about 7.7 billion won) to the plaintiff, fashion columnist E. Jean Carroll, was upheld. Trump fiercely criticized the Supreme Court decision and said he would "keep fighting."
The Supreme Court dismissed Trump's appeal request regarding the civil sexual abuse trial he lost in 2023, according to The Associated Press and The New York Times. The court's decision gave no reasons and included no public dissenting opinions.
In May 2023, before taking office, Trump received a verdict at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York ordering him to pay $5 million to the plaintiff, Carroll, in a civil sexual abuse lawsuit. Carroll claimed she was sexually assaulted by Trump, whom she encountered by chance at Bergdorf Goodman, an upscale department store in Manhattan, New York, in 1996.
The first-trial jury said it found no evidence of sexual assault but concluded that Trump had sexually abused Carroll, and the court ordered $5 million in damages. After the appellate court also upheld the first-trial ruling on appeal, Trump requested an appeal to the Supreme Court last November.
Carroll has filed a separate defamation lawsuit seeking damages against Trump. On that matter, the first-trial court decided in January 2024 that Trump must pay $83.3 million (about 128.5 billion won) in damages, and the appellate court upheld it last September.
Trump's legal team plans to also request an appeal of this case to the Supreme Court.
The New York Times described Monday's Supreme Court decision as "a significant blow to Trump," reporting that it "effectively put an end to his legal effort to challenge the jury's verdict that he sexually abused Carroll in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s." Trump criticized the Supreme Court decision through his social media platform Truth Social, saying, "Astonishingly, the Supreme Court of the United States decided not to review a fake case brought by a woman I have never met." He added, "I will continue to fight against this political weaponization of justice and legal attacks aimed at me, especially the absurd defamation claims, with all my strength and capability." He further stressed, "This case is in effect a case about the United States and everything America stands for, and this must never happen again to any president or presidential candidate going forward."
