President Donald Trump continues to maintain his innocence in cases involving claims of sexual assault against New York City-based columnist E. Jean Carroll.
As such, he is also continuing to pursue various legal avenues to
either get the cases overturned or the court-awarded financial judgments against him thrown out based on various legal arguments.
As such, three days after the U.S. Supreme Court released its first set of summer orders, Trump’s request that the justices reconsider their decision allowing the 2023 civil judgment in Carroll’s favor to stand was circulated for review.
The move means the court could act on Trump’s rehearing petition when it issues its next set of summer orders on Monday, Aug. 17.
Carroll filed the lawsuit underlying Trump’s petition in federal court in New York in 2022.
She alleged that Trump sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at a Manhattan department store in 1996 and later defamed her in 2022 after she publicly accused him of the assault.
A jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld the verdict.
Trump appealed to the Supreme Court last fall, arguing that the trial court improperly allowed Carroll’s attorneys to introduce testimony from other women who accused him of sexual assault, as well as the 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump spoke about grabbing women by their genitals.
In her response urging the Supreme Court to reject the petition, Carroll argued that even if the disputed evidence had been excluded, the outcome would have been the same because the remaining evidence supporting her claims was substantial.
Trump’s original petition was initially distributed for the justices’ Feb. 20, 2026, conference but was rescheduled several times before being considered at the June 25 conference.
The Supreme Court denied the petition on June 29, after which Trump filed a petition for rehearing on July 8.
SCOTUSBlog reported that justices have not granted a petition to reconsider their denial of review since 2018.
Much of Carroll’s case against Trump made little sense at the time.
Most critics claimed that she only filed her allegations after Trump became president and that if the assault really did happen in the mid-1990s, she should have filed then.
Earlier this spring, Conservative Brief reported that uber-wealthy Democratic donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman was a major funder of Carroll’s successful sexual assault lawsuit against Trump.
However, Carroll “completely forgot” when questioned under oath to disclose Hoffman’s financial involvement with her case.
And now, the Justice Department has opened an investigation into her statement, which she made under oath, as well as the nonprofit that Hoffman operates.
The DOJ probe drew immediate rebuke from the left, who accused the Trump administration of weaponizing the government against a woman who a Manhattan jury decided was victimized by Trump in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room three decades ago.
In 2023 and 2024, jurors awarded Carroll, a former Elle columnist, more than $88 million for defamation and sexual abuse in two civil lawsuits against Trump.
Critics of Carroll’s lawsuits say the DOJ’s investigation into her misstatement and the financial involvement of Hoffman will provide much-needed scrutiny of a case they have labeled “a hoax” paid for and directed by wealthy political opponents in a scheme to stop Trump from winning a second presidential term.
“Companies (or their principals) are making money off ordinary Americans only to turn around and use it to try to thwart the political choices made by ordinary Americans,” Jeffrey Clark, a former top Trump administration official, told the Washington Times in May.
“Meanwhile, you get lectures about democracy,” he added.
A source familiar with the DOJ investigation said that, for now anyway, Carroll is not a subject of the probe.
Federal prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois are investigating matters related to her deposition and perjury.
