UPDATE 7 p.m.  Monday:  Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll, citing today’s Supreme Court order, argue in letter to 2d Circuit that the order makes moot the Trump effort to undo the payment of the $5.6 million verdict to Carroll.  They claim the Trump appeal depended on getting rehearing in the Supreme Court.

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The Supreme Court, two lower federal courts, one state court and one local court have made some progress in managing the seven-years-long saga between Donald Trump and his most successful legal challenger, author and former advice columnist E. Jean Carrroll.  But a one-line order issued by the Supreme Court this morning is nowhere near the last step.

With no explanation and with no count of how the Justices voted on it, the Court simply recorded a denial of Trump’s request that the Court take another look at the $5 million verdict that Carroll won from a New York City jury in a sexual assault and defamation case that she had first filed in November 2019.

The Justices had refused in late June to review that verdict – then, too, without comment.  The Court’s staff had sent that plea to the Justices for private discussion 16 times before it was denied.  That left Trump’s team with the possibility — always a long shot – of convincing the Court to reconsider.  That is what failed on Monday.

The immediate next step will be up to a federal appeals court in New York City, deciding what to do with still another maneuver by Trump’s lawyers.  Carroll, in fact, has already received the money from the verdict at issue (totaling, with interest, $5,625,005.48).  Still pending at the appeals court, though, is a new attempt by Trump to compel Carroll to return the funds to a courthouse account until that part of the ongoing dispute is settled.

Trump’s lawyers have been working energetically to keep his challenges going.  Three years ago, the judge who presided over two trials of Carroll’s claims accused the Trump team of “asserting or inventing” a new legal defense “each time his prior effort to delay the case fails.”

Jean Carroll’s legal team had already been arguing that the dispute about the money she already has received has been over for weeks.  They are likely to argue now that the latest Supreme Court defeat for Trump certainly ends that phase of the ongoing dispute.

But, whatever occurs next in the appeals court, there is a new legal confrontation coming for Trump, Jean Carroll and their teams.  There is an entirely separate verdict, against Trump and in favor of Carroll, and it is for a huge sum: $83.3 million, before accumulating interest is added.

That was the result of a second jury trial, concluded in 2024, involving renewed claims by Carroll that Trump had continued to defame her with public comments against her after she won the first verdict in 2003.  (Of the $83.3 million, $65 million was the amount the jury selected as a form of punishment of Trump; the remainder represents awards for harms done to her by his comments.)

Trump, in a filing for himself, and his Justice Department, in a filing in his support, are asking the Supreme Court to scuttle that verdict.  The two filings raise highly significant constitutional questions about potential legal immunity for Trump as President, and about the availability of a legal maneuver in which the Justice Department could take over the defense of Trump and then scuttle not only the huge verdict, but all of the underlying claims by Carroll on which that verdict rests.

Although Trump’s new appeal contends that the case is so important that the Justices should take it up “immediately,” his lawyers have not yet filed a specific request to put this dispute on a fast schedule.  The separate appeal by the Justice Department warned the Court of potentially great harm to the Presidency in he loses the case.  It declared: “The President of the United States is under threat of owing nearly a hundred million dollars (after interest) for statements defending his character and fitness for office that fall well within the scope of his federal job.”

Carroll’s lawyers are due to file briefs by the end of this month, challenging the new Trump and Justice Department appeals.  At this point, the Justices have not had the new filings before them for a vote on whether or not to hear them.  It could be weeks before the Justices make a decision to review or to simply deny the appeals.