Donald Trump’s latest attempt to weasel his way out of paying E. Jean Carroll involved a bold-faced lie to a federal judge.
In a legal filing submitted Tuesday, Trump’s attorneys asked Judge Lewis Kaplan not to release some of the funds he owes to the beleaguered columnist on the basis that the president’s petition for a new hearing was still pending before the Supreme Court. The only hiccup: The Supreme Court had rejected Trump’s petition filing.
By Wednesday, though, the SCOTUS docket had been updated to reflect that the nation’s highest court was anticipating a corrected petition from the president’s team.
Carroll has a long and grim history with the president. Trump was found liable by a jury in May 2023 for having sexually abused her in the mid-1990s, for which she was awarded $5 million in damages.
Trump lost his defamation case against her the following January, when Kaplan ruled that Trump had continued to defame the advice columnist by denying the rape on the basis that she wasn’t his “type,” and by accusing her of making up the sexual assault allegations against him for the benefit of her book. A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in that case.
But Carroll hasn’t yet seen a dime from either of her legal victories. In May, a federal appeals court allowed Trump to continue staving off his payments until the Supreme Court decided whether to pick up the case. The high court did so last week, rejecting Trump’s challenge and allowing the verdict to stand.
Late last month, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan asked a judge to implement an expedited payment schedule for the sum that Trump owes Carroll (Kaplan is not related to the New York–based judge of the same name). She referred to a June 2023 filing in which both parties agreed that Carroll could collect if the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
Kaplan added that, by this point, the $5 million sum had accrued an additional $779,783 in interest, raising Trump’s debt in the initial case to nearly $5.8 million.
“This is the end of the line,” Kaplan wrote in a June 30 filing. “It is time for him to pay Carroll.”
This story has been updated.