President Donald Trump has run out of room at the Supreme Court. On August 17, 2026, the justices denied his request to reconsider his appeal in the case brought by advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, shutting down — for a second time — his bid to undo a verdict finding him liable for sexually abusing her in 1996. The fight has run for years and cost the president millions.
No explanation accompanied the ruling, which arrived as a single-sentence order with no noted dissents. A dispute that started with a jury verdict and traveled all the way to Washington, D.C., was, for practical purposes, over — rejected at the last stop.
A Rehearing the Court Rarely Grants
Trump had been here before. On June 29, the justices declined to hear the case outright. Instead of letting that stand, he asked the court to think again — a long-shot maneuver by any measure.
Such requests almost never succeed. The court reserves rehearings for exceptional circumstances that seldom come along, and Trump’s attorneys were asking the justices to revisit a refusal that had already gone against them, hoping for traction that earlier attempts never found.
What came back on August 17 was one sentence, no comment, no noted dissents — precisely the outcome legal observers had reason to anticipate. On this front, nothing further can be appealed.
Behind the petition was a jury’s conclusion that Trump was liable for sexual abuse and defamation, along with an order that he pay Carroll $5 million. That verdict now stands unshaken.
How the Case Began
The public first learned of the allegations in 2019, when Carroll, an advice columnist, laid them out in her book, “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal.” She wrote about an encounter she said happened in 1996 at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury department store in New York City.
By her account, Trump forced her against a dressing room wall, held her in place and raped her. He has consistently denied the accusations, saying in an interview that Carroll was “not my type” and claiming he’d never met her — a denial complicated by photographs showing the two of them together.
Two separate lawsuits followed. Carroll sued Trump for defamation in 2019, then in 2022 filed another suit accusing him of battery and defamation under New York’s Adult Survivors Act. The one-year lookback window that law created let survivors of sexual abuse file claims the statute of limitations would otherwise have blocked, opening a route Carroll would not have had on ordinary timelines.
The Verdict Stands
The rehearing bid amounted to a last-ditch effort. The $5 million judgment had already been resolved through the legal process by the time the August order landed, and asking the court to reconsider its earlier refusal was all Trump had left.
The sequence is worth pausing on: the president was pressing the Supreme Court to revisit the underlying verdict even as the financial and legal consequences were taking shape. The August 17 order ended that request, and both the payment and the finding of liability remain intact.
Carroll went public in 2019 with allegations that reshaped a national conversation, and the denial closes a legal journey that carried her from the pages of a memoir into a courtroom and on to the marble halls of the Supreme Court. Neither the jury’s decision nor the $5 million verdict at its center will get another look.
There is something telling in the court’s silence. Reasoning rarely accompanies orders of this kind, and with no dissent noted, the justices appear to have had little appetite for returning to a matter they had already turned away once. Weeks apart, two denials said the same thing.
Where this verdict is concerned, the options that once appeared open to Trump have narrowed to none. A jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation; the highest court in the land has now left that finding undisturbed, and it stands as the last word.
One track of the Carroll litigation does remain open. In a 2024 defamation case, a separate jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million, and on July 28 he and the Justice Department asked the justices to hear an appeal of that award, arguing that presidential immunity shields statements he made in office. That petition is still pending.