President Donald Trump is positioned to ask the Supreme Court to toss a New York jury’s 2024 verdict that found him liable for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll by disputing her accusation of sexual abuse.
On Wednesday, a federal appeals court declined Trump’s request to rehear his appeal of the $83 million defamation case “en banc,” or by the full bench of judges. That development sets the president’s legal team up to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
The dismissal from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this week marks the second time in seven months an appeals court has blocked Trump from overturning the verdict, which concluded that the president defamed Carroll when he disputed her accusation that he sexually abused her in a dressing room in the 1990s. The first was in September 2025, when the 2nd Circuit rejected Trump’s argument that he was entitled to presidential immunity for the statements he made denying Carroll’s accusation. This time around, Trump tried unsuccessfully to substitute the United States as a defendant in the case.
“The fact of the matter is that no other defendant would be permitted to move to substitute the United States in his place, fifteen months after trial and the entry of judgment against him,” Judge Denny Chin wrote in a 34-page statement supporting the court’s decision to dismiss Trump’s appeal for the second time on Wednesday. “The Court appropriately declined to convene en banc to revisit this issue.”
Carroll has brought two lawsuits against Trump, both of them regarding defamation over her sexual abuse claims. The president has denied all her claims, arguing that the timing of her accusation was suspicious and helped promote her book tour. Trump has also claimed Carroll has lied about key evidence, including the dress she said she was wearing at the time of the alleged assault.
“E. Jean Carroll was forced to change her story about her ‘dress’ when Donna Karan, the designer of the dress, said that it wasn’t conceived or manufactured until long after the date in question,” Trump wrote in a 2024 post to Truth Social. “In other words, the Monica Lewinsky type gambit failed badly, then also learning that there was ZERO EVIDENCE on the dress, despite all of the threats. All of this HOAX run and funded by Political Operatives!!!”
Carroll filed the first lawsuit in 2019 and secured a $5 million victory in a 2023 court decision. She filed the second lawsuit in 2022, making additional claims under New York’s Adult Survivors Act. She won that case as well, winning herself over $83 million.
Trump has appealed both verdicts. The Supreme Court is currently considering Trump’s appeal to have justices consider the $5 million case.
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The 2nd Circuit’s dismissal of his appeal for a rehearing of the second case opens up the president to ask the Supreme Court to examine the $83 million verdict as well.
“I don’t know E. Jean Carroll, I never met her or touched her (except on a celebrity line with her African American husband who she disgustingly called the ‘Ape,’), I wouldn’t want to know or touch her, I never abused her or raped her or took her to a dressing room 25 years ago in a crowded department store where the doors are LOCKED, she has no idea when, or did anything else to her,” Trump said.