Courts reject Trump's Hail Mary bids to avoid paying E. Jean Carroll

Courts reject Trump's Hail Mary bids to avoid paying E. Jean Carroll Courts at every level have rebuffed Trump's efforts to block the payment. 07/09/2026 04:18 PM EDT After three years, three levels of the federal courts system and countless legal filings, Donald Trump must pay E. Jean Carroll. On Wednesday evening, a judge on the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals denied Trump’s effort to pause an order issued earlier in the day by a district judge to send the money — $5 million plus interest — to Carroll. That means Carroll, who is owed a total of $88.3 million plus interest from Trump as a result of two jury verdicts, is set to finally receive her first payment. The money is already in escrow. The writing was on the wall as early as last week, after the Supreme Court said it wouldn’t consider Trump’s effort to overturn the 2023 verdict. But Trump made a series of eleventh-hour attempts to forestall the payment. First, Trump asked U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to reject Carroll’s request for payment so that he could ask the Supreme Court, which had already declined to get involved, to reconsider. Then, when Kaplan instead granted Carroll’s request, Trump appealed that ruling to the 2nd Circuit, asking the appellate court to pause Kaplan’s order. It also refused. The $5 million judgment resulted from a trial in which a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation.Carroll alleged that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s and then described her allegations as a “hoax” after she went public with them during the first term of his presidency. A second judgment of $83.3 million came after another trial in early 2024, in which a jury awarded Carroll for another set of remarks about her claims that a judge had found defamatory. Trump is still pursuing an appeal of that case. Technically, Trump has already given up the money — he was required to put it into a court-maintained account during the appeals process. Now it must be turned over to Carroll. A specific payment schedule is not known. Trump “has been stalling this case for years,” the judge wrote. “It is time for him to ‘do equity’ and pay the judgment.”