Trump wants delay, E. Jean Carroll wants verdict paid

The writer E. Jean Carroll is seeking the prompt release of the nearly $5.8 million she is owed from a civil jury verdict holding President Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming her, a new court filing by her lawyers said.

But Trump wants to delay that so he can potentially ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its refusal Monday to hear his appeal, according to the filing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Such a request is rarely granted.

And Carroll flatly rejects the suggestion she allow any further delay in her getting paid.

“This is the end of the line,” Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan wrote in the filing Tuesday night to District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, asking him to order the release of funds set aside by Trump to satisfy the May 2023 jury verdict.

“To date, Carroll has agreed to each of Defendant’s many requests to delay the payment he owes her,” wrote Kaplan, who is not related to the judge. “Given the extraordinary lengths he has taken to avoid such payments and that each of those efforts has been denied in full, that cooperation ends today.”

“It is time for him to pay Carroll.”

The filing cites prior statements by Judge Kaplan, who has said Trump had engaged in litigation tactics that suggested he had a “strong desire to delay” the case, and a related lawsuit against him by Carroll.

“A petition for rehearing is likely to fail,” Kaplan wrote. “Requiring Carroll to endure further delay while Defendant seeks rehearing would both be profoundly unfair and undermine the public interest.”

Asked for comment, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team said, “The American People stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes.”

“President Trump will keep winning against Liberal Lawfare, as he continues to focus on his mission to Make America Great Again,” the spokesman, who asked not to be identified by name, said.

Judge Kaplan on Wednesday ordered Trump’s lawyers to respond by next Tuesday to Carroll’s motion for the award to be released to her.

The jury in the case found Trump had sexually abused Carroll in the mid-1990s in a dressing room in a Manhattan department store and that he had defamed her in denying her allegations when she went public with them two decades later.

The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Since Trump deposited funds with the court to secure the verdict pending his appeal, that money has earned nearly $800,000 in interest that Carroll is entitled to as well.

The $5 million verdict is noted as a liability in Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure report, which was made public on Tuesday by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

The same report notes a separate liability from another Manhattan federal court jury’s award of $83.3 million to Carroll from Trump for defaming her when he denied sexually assaulting her. That award, which Trump is continuing to appeal, relates to separate statements the president made about Carroll from the ones that led to the $5 million verdict in the other case.

Trump unsuccessfully asked both Judge Kaplan and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the $5 million verdict.

And on Monday, the Supreme Court said it would not take Trump’s appeal in that case.

There were no noted dissents to that decision from any of the nine justices — three of whom were nominated by Trump during his first term in the White House.

Roberta Kaplan, in the new filing, said that shortly after the Supreme Court’s denial, Trump wrote a Truth Social post that “continued his stream of defamatory attacks on Carroll.”

Trump wrote, “Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a Fake Case brought against me by a woman I never met (Decades old celebrity photo line, standing with her husband, does not count!).”

Within minutes of the post, Kaplan wrote, Trump’s lawyers contacted Carroll’s attorneys to ask if she would agree to further delay enforcement of the award so that the president “can ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its denial of certiorari.”

Certiorari is the term for the Supreme Court agreeing to review a case from lower courts.

Carroll’s lawyers told Trump’s team that a prior order by Judge Kaplan directed the award to be disbursed “immediately upon denial of a petition for certiorari,” the filing said.

Trump’s lawyer then “clarified that he was requesting that Carroll consent to a ‘new stay or continuance of execution’ ” of the disbursement, Roberta Kaplan wrote.

Kaplan said she told Trump’s lawyer that Carroll did not agree to delaying the release of the funds.

She also asked if Trump would agree to stipulate that the funds should be released. Trump’s lawyer replied that the president could not respond to that question before Thursday, according to the filing.

Kaplan wrote that there is no “practical or equitable reason” to delay giving Carroll the money “based on the mere theoretical possibility of rehearing” by the Supreme Court.

She noted that the high court grants certiorari in just “a handful of cases each year.”

“And rehearing is an even more extraordinary remedy, granted in only narrow circumstances,” she wrote.

“There is no reason to believe that the Supreme Court would grant it here.”