Donald Trump has run out of courtroom options in one of his longest-running legal battles—and now the bill is coming due.
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered that nearly $5.8 million be immediately released to E. Jean Carroll after Trump exhausted his appeals in the case stemming from a jury’s finding that he was liable for sexually assaulting and defaming her.
The payment will come from a court-controlled escrow account that has been holding the money while Trump continued fighting the verdict. The account has grown with interest over the past several years, reaching millions of dollars.
Judge Lewis Kaplan approved the payment after rejecting Trump’s latest attempt to delay it.
Trump’s lawyers had argued that Carroll should have to wait until the Supreme Court fully considers his request to revisit the case, warning that paying the money now could cause him an “irreparable harm” if the court later sided with him.
But the Supreme Court had already rejected Trump’s attempt to take up the case, and the justices have not agreed to rehear it.
The judge wasn’t persuaded by Trump’s argument that the payment should be put on hold.
The order marks another defeat for Trump in a legal fight that has stretched across multiple years and courtrooms.
The case began after Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her inside a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s. Trump denied the allegations and repeatedly attacked Carroll publicly, leading to the defamation claims that became central to the lawsuit.
In 2023, a federal jury unanimously found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and defaming her, awarding her $5 million in damages.
Then, in a separate trial in 2024, another jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll an additional $83 million for further defamatory statements.
Trump has continued to deny Carroll’s allegations, calling the case a “hoax” and a “con job” and accusing the courts of targeting him politically. After the Supreme Court rejected his appeal last month, Trump vowed to keep fighting what he called “weaponization” and “lawfare” against him.
But for the first judgment, the fight is effectively over.
Carroll’s attorneys argued that Trump’s repeated attempts to delay payment appeared to be an effort to buy more time rather than a legitimate legal strategy.
“This is the end of the line,” they said in court filings.
Meanwhile, the judge has made the next step clear: Trump must pay.
