The Supreme Court declined to hear Trump’s appeal in the E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse case on Monday, letting stand the $5 million jury verdict from May 2023 that found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The unsigned order provided no explanation, no noted dissents, and no indication of how individual justices voted — including whether Thomas, Alito, or any of the Trump appointees attempted to take the case.
The silence is the most significant part. When a case this consequential gets denied without a single noted dissent from a court with three Trump appointees, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, something has gone wrong somewhere. Whether that’s a failure of nerve, a legal assessment that the petition was procedurally flawed, or something else entirely — the public isn’t being told. The unsigned order simply says no, and that’s it.
On the merits, the Carroll case has always been deeply problematic. No corroborating witnesses. No physical evidence. No specific date for an alleged assault that Carroll says happened sometime in the mid-1990s at a department store. A dress that Carroll claimed to have worn during the alleged attack that wasn’t in production at the time the media originally claimed the incident occurred. An Adult Survivors Act — signed by New York Democrats specifically to enable time-barred claims against Trump — that allowed a lawsuit that would have been legally dead under normal statute of limitations rules.
The $83.3 million verdict from Carroll I — for Trump’s denial of the allegations, which courts have treated as defamation — sits on top of the $5 million from Carroll II. Combined, that’s over $88 million in civil liability for a man who has consistently denied the allegations, for an incident that allegedly occurred decades ago, based on one witness’s account with no corroborating evidence.
The double standard is undeniable and should be stated plainly. The same institutions that treated E. Jean Carroll as an unimpeachable truth-teller have consistently given Bill Clinton, Hunter Biden, and other Democratic figures the benefit of every doubt in similar or worse allegations. That isn’t justice. It is a two-tiered legal system that produces different outcomes based on the defendant’s political affiliation — and the Supreme Court’s decision to leave the Carroll verdicts intact without explanation does nothing to address that fundamental inequity.
There’s also a broader principle at stake. Any accusation, no matter how lacking in corroborating evidence, can now result in massive civil liability for Republican politicians under New York’s expanded statute of limitations framework — while Democratic figures face no equivalent legal exposure regardless of the credibility of allegations against them.
The Carroll verdict will stand. The $88 million liability will stand. And the question of whether the Supreme Court’s conservative justices believe the case deserved scrutiny will remain unanswered behind an unsigned order with no dissents noted. That silence is not reassuring.
