Donald Trump’s lawyers have filed an emergency motion demanding that E. Jean Carroll hand back the $5.6 million a federal court released to her less than two weeks ago, after the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal of the verdict that put the money in her hands.
The filing lands at the end of a three year fight over a jury award Trump had already deposited. In May 2023, a nine person federal jury in Manhattan found him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996 and for defaming her when he denied it, and awarded her $5 million. Trump put the money into a court controlled escrow account and appealed.
He lost at the Second Circuit, lost his request for the full appeals court to rehear the case, and on June 29 the Supreme Court declined his petition without a single noted dissent. On July 8, Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered the escrow account to release the funds, writing that Trump “has been stalling this case for years.
Trump’s attorneys immediately asked an appeals court for an emergency stay and were denied in a one sentence order that placed no conditions on how Carroll could use the money. The disbursement went through the next day. Court records show the transfer totaled $5,625,005.48, the original $5 million plus three years of accrued interest.
Carroll announced it herself on her Substack with four words: “The Eagle Has Landed.” Her lead attorney Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge, confirmed the payment and said the writer had finally received what the jury awarded her three years earlier.
Twelve days later, Trump’s team is asking a court to reverse it. Their argument rests on the claim that he faces what his lawyers called an “unrecoverable loss” if the Supreme Court eventually reconsiders and rules his way, because Carroll has said publicly that she intends to give away money she collects from him. Once the funds move to third parties, the argument goes, they cannot be retrieved.
E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers have already answered that in court papers. She is 82 years old, and her filing states that she plans to use the award to fund her retirement and will hold it in an interest bearing account at least until Trump’s bid for Supreme Court reconsideration is resolved. Trump’s side responded that the assurance is meaningless because she could still choose to give the money away later. Her attorneys argue the clawback attempt is unjustified given that the funds were disbursed from an account the court itself controlled, on the court’s own order, after every avenue of appeal had been exhausted.
There is a detail in this that most coverage moves past quickly. Carroll’s legal team works on contingency and is not taking fees out of this particular award. That means the entire $5,625,005.48 belongs to her. The money Trump is trying to recover is not a law firm’s cut of a settlement. It is the retirement account of an 82 year old woman who spent three years in federal court to collect it.
This is also the smaller of the two judgments against him. In January 2024, a separate Manhattan jury ordered Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her in 2019, broken into $11 million to repair her reputation, $7.3 million in other compensatory damages, and $65 million in punitive damages. That award has not been disbursed. Trump is still appealing it, and his lawyers have signaled they intend to take it to the Supreme Court after the Second Circuit declined to overturn the verdict.
What makes the current motion unusual is the posture. Trump is not asking a court to stop a payment. The payment already happened. He is asking a court to order a private citizen to return money a federal judge directed be paid to her, under a judgment the Supreme Court has already declined to disturb. He is pursuing it while simultaneously asking those same justices to take a second look at a petition they rejected in June with no dissents recorded, which is a long shot by any measure.
No court has ruled on the motion. The appeals court that denied his emergency stay has not addressed the follow up request. For now, the money is exactly where Judge Kaplan ordered it to go.
Trump has denied E. Jean Carroll’s allegations from the beginning, calling the case a hoax and repeating that he never met her, statements that are themselves at the center of the defamation findings against him. The jury in the 2023 trial did not find that he raped her. It found that he sexually abused her, and it found that his denials defamed her. Both findings have now survived every level of federal appellate review available.
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