A one-sentence order, no explanation attached and no dissents recorded, was all it took on August 17, 2026, for the Supreme Court to shut down President Donald Trump’s last attempt to undo a jury’s finding that he sexually abused advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996. The justices refused to revisit their earlier decision not to hear his appeal, drawing a line under a fight that consumed years and millions of dollars.
What remains untouched is a jury’s conclusion that Trump was liable for both sexual abuse and defamation, along with the $5 million it ordered him to pay Carroll. That money had already moved through the legal system before the August order landed, which meant the rehearing bid was the president’s only remaining play — an attempt to have the nation’s highest court reopen a verdict whose consequences were already in motion.
A Rehearing the Court Rarely Grants
The August order was actually the second time the justices had waved Trump off. They had passed on the case on June 29. Instead of letting that stand, his attorneys filed for a rehearing, asking the court to look again at its own refusal.
Such requests almost never succeed. The court reserves them for extraordinary circumstances that seldom arise, and legal observers had little reason to expect a different result this time. Two rejections, weeks apart, carried the same meaning.
Silence from the bench is its own kind of signal. Orders of this type typically arrive without reasoning, and with not a single justice noting a dissent, there appeared to be no appetite among them for returning to a dispute they had already brushed aside once.
How the Case Began
Carroll went public in 2019 with a passage in her book, “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal.” She wrote about an incident she said occurred in 1996 inside Bergdorf Goodman, the upscale department store in New York City. By her account, Trump pinned her against the wall of a dressing room, held her there and raped her.
Trump has never wavered from denying it. He told an interviewer that Carroll was “not my type” and insisted the two had never met — an assertion undercut by photos of the pair together.
Her claims moved through the courts along two separate paths. The first was a 2019 defamation suit. The second came in 2022, when she sued for battery and defamation under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, a statute that opened a one-year lookback window for survivors of sexual abuse to file claims the statute of limitations would otherwise have blocked. Without that window, Carroll would have had no way into court.
The Verdict Stands
For the columnist whose allegations helped reshape a national conversation when she first spoke out in 2019, the ruling closes a journey that ran from the pages of a memoir through a courtroom and into the marble corridors of Washington, D.C. Every avenue Trump once had for challenging this particular verdict is now gone.
One piece of the Carroll litigation, however, is still alive. A different jury handed down an $83.3 million defamation award against Trump in 2024, and on July 28 he and the Justice Department petitioned the justices to review it, contending that presidential immunity covers remarks he made while in office. The court has not yet acted on that request.
