US Supreme Court Rejects Trump's Appeal: He Will Have to Pay $5 Million

The US Supreme Court has rejected former President Donald Trump's appeal of a ruling that he must pay $5 million in damages to writer E. Jean Carroll for sexual assault and defamation.This decision means Trump will have to pay Carroll the $5 million. The case was one of two separate lawsuits Carroll had filed against Trump. In 2019, Carroll had filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump, and in 2022, she filed another lawsuit under a New York law that allows civil suits for past sexual assault allegations.In the 2022 lawsuit, a jury had ruled that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll and defamed her with his subsequent statements, awarding her $5 million in damages. In the 2019 defamation lawsuit, Trump was ordered to pay approximately $83 million in damages. Carroll's attorney, Roberta Kaplan, stated after the Supreme Court's decision, 'Today's decision confirms, once and for all, the jury's unanimous verdict that Donald J. Trump sexually assaulted and defamed E. Jean Carroll. All of Trump's efforts to escape this judgment have failed.'Carroll alleged that Trump had sexually assaulted her in a New York store in the mid-1990s and later defamed her by saying she had made up the allegations to sell books. Trump denied the allegations. Trump's legal team described the lawsuits as a 'witch hunt' financed by Democrats. In a statement, Trump's team said, 'The American people are with Trump, and they want these political witch hunts to end. Trump will continue his fight to make America great again.' It is expected that Trump's attorneys will appeal the second $83 million judgment in the coming days to the US Supreme Court.