The Supreme Court rescheduled Donald Trump’s petition for review for the 11th time on Wednesday, pushing back another decision in his bid to overturn the $5 million verdict entered against him in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation case.
Trump is asking the justices to review the judgment that came after Carroll filed a federal lawsuit in New York in 2022, saying he did not get a fair trial because her lawyers were allowed to present testimony from other women who said he had assaulted them and because the 2005 Access Hollywood tape was admitted. Carroll, who contended that Trump sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in 1996 and later defamed her in a 2022 social media post calling her accusations a “Hoax,” urged the court to stay out of the case.
The delay keeps alive one of the most closely watched offshoots of the broader Carroll litigation, and it comes after the court distributed the case on Jan. 28 for consideration at its Feb. 20 conference before postponing action one day before that date. A federal appeals court has already upheld the $5 million verdict, and Trump asked the Supreme Court in November 2025 to take up the appeal.
Carroll argued that even if the jury should not have been allowed to consider the disputed evidence, it would not have changed the outcome because, in her words, “the rest of her case was so strong.” A New York jury awarded her $5 million in 2023 after finding Trump liable for sexually abusing her in a Bergdorf Goodman lingerie dressing room years earlier.
The separate defamation case involving Carroll is larger still: a federal appeals court upheld an $83 million verdict in her favor, and Trump has indicated he plans to ask the Supreme Court to review that ruling as well. He has also sought to have the U.S. government replace him in that lawsuit, arguing he was president when he made the statements at issue.
At the heart of the fight is whether jurors were properly allowed to hear from other accusers under Federal Rules 413, 414 and 415, which were changed in 1995 to allow past-accuser testimony in certain cases. The New York Post article names Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff as propensity witnesses in Trump’s case. For now, though, the practical result is simple: the high court has again put off deciding whether to hear the challenge, leaving the $5 million Carroll verdict in place while Trump keeps pressing for a reversal.
