Author and longtime Trump critic E. Jean Carroll may have to wait much longer than anticipated before seeing a dime from the massive civil judgment she secured against the president.
In January 2024, a New York jury awarded Carroll $83 million in damages for defamation and assault after finding Donald Trump civilly liable over an alleged encounter in a Manhattan department store dressing room dating back to 1996. According to Western Journal, WAGA-TV reported this week that an appeals court has now ruled Trump does not yet have to pay Carroll, as his legal team seeks to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court for review. The president is, however, required to post a $7.4 million bond to cover interest costs while the case continues to wind its way through the courts.
The underlying allegations, and the legal maneuvers that allowed them to be heard decades later, have long raised serious questions among conservatives about the integrity of the process. Writing for the Palm Beach Republican Club, Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson pointed out that Carroll could not recall when the alleged assault occurred, placing it vaguely somewhere between 1994 and 1996, and that she did not publicly write about the incident until Trump had become a major political figure. Carroll further claimed she remembered the dress she wore that day, yet that particular garment was reportedly not even in production at the time she says the incident occurred.
The evidentiary gaps do not end there, as Carroll has acknowledged there were no witnesses to the alleged encounter. In her 2019 book, she notably did not describe the incident as rape, instead referring to it as a fight, a characterization that stands in stark contrast to the explosive language later used in court and in the media. After Carroll went public and Trump responded forcefully, she alleged that his remarks defamed her and damaged her career, but when ELLE magazine parted ways with her, the publication denied that its decision had anything to do with the president. That disconnect between her claims of professional harm and the magazines stated rationale has only added to skepticism about the case.
The legal framework that enabled Carrolls lawsuit has also drawn intense scrutiny. Hanson noted that the statute of limitations for such claims had long since expired, but New Yorks 2022 Adult Survivors Act created a special one-year window allowing alleged victims to sue regardless of how much time had passed. The laws sponsor, Democratic state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, is a well-known Trump antagonist who previously pushed legislation to give federal commissions access to New York tax returns, a move widely seen as an attempt to open another front against the then-president. For many observers, the timing and authorship of the law make it difficult to dismiss the suspicion that it was tailored with Trump in mind.
Even the jurys findings and the trial judges interpretation have fueled controversy. The jury did not find Trump liable for rape under New Yorks strict penal code definition, yet Clinton-appointed Judge Lewis Kaplan effectively invited Carroll to continue using the term in the broader, colloquial sense. The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was raped within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump raped her as many people commonly understand the word rape, Kaplan wrote, blurring a legal line that is usually treated with great precision. To many on the right, that reasoning looks less like neutral adjudication and more like an effort to preserve a politically useful narrative.
Taken together, the sequence is troubling: a special law passed by an avowedly anti-Trump legislator opens a narrow window decades after the fact; an accuser who stayed silent for years cannot recall the date, offers no witnesses, initially avoids the term rape, and then secures a staggering financial award under the guidance of a Democrat-appointed judge who effectively redefines the word. The optics are not those of blind justice, but of a legal system increasingly weaponized against a political opponent. That perception is only reinforced by the broader pattern of lawfare conservatives see deployed against Trump in multiple jurisdictions.
Carrolls own public persona has hardly helped her credibility in the eyes of many Americans who still value traditional standards of character and decorum. A longtime sex-advice writer, she in 2015 created a mobile game for Android and Apple in which users attempt to sabotage relationships: Your object is to break them up to stir up s**t, the games description declared. She has also boasted of naming her cat Vagina T. Fireball, a detail that, while trivial on its face, hardly projects the seriousness and dignity one might expect from someone asking a jury to believe a decades-old allegation and award tens of millions of dollars.
Viewed holistically, Carroll comes across to many critics as a sad, lonely, aging, vindictive, dishonest woman who still operates like shes in her 20s when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex, someone who wants her life to be a television show, full of drama with the spotlight on her.
Against that backdrop, the notion that she should receive an $83 million windfall from a president she openly despises strikes many as an abuse of the civil justice system rather than a triumph of it. For those who see this case as part of a broader campaign to hound Trump out of public life through the courts rather than at the ballot box, the latest appellate ruling is a small but significant check on what they regard as yet another front in the ongoing lawfare against the 45th president.
Login