This article was originally published on Crafting Your Home. A human contributor also wrote and edited the post.
President Donald Trump’s long legal battle with writer E. Jean Carroll has taken another turn, and this time the fight is not over whether he owes her money, but whether she should have to hand back what she has already received.
Less than two weeks after a court released roughly $5.6 million to Carroll, Trump’s legal team filed an emergency request asking a federal appeals court to force her to return it while they continue trying to overturn the underlying case.
The payment traces back to a 2023 federal jury verdict finding Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll over an encounter she said happened in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, the Manhattan department store, sometime in the mid-1990s.
Trump has denied the allegations from the very beginning and has continued to deny them throughout years of appeals, but the jury’s finding has held up through every level of review it has faced since.
That verdict is separate from a second, larger judgment against Trump of $83.3 million tied to another defamation claim from Carroll, meaning the two cases have moved through the court system on parallel but distinct tracks.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered the funds released from the court-controlled escrow account where the money had been sitting since Trump deposited it years earlier to satisfy the judgment.
In doing so, Kaplan did not mince words about how long the process had already dragged on. He wrote that Trump had spent years “stalling” the case, and pointed out that even the U.S. Supreme Court, which includes three justices Trump himself appointed, had declined to take up his challenge and let the verdict stand.
Why Trump’s Legal Team Wants the Money Sent Back
With the appeals process at the Supreme Court level now closed off, Trump’s attorneys have shifted their strategy to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, asking the court to order Carroll to return the $5.6 million while they pursue further legal action against the verdict itself.
The request is structured as an emergency injunction, a legal tool typically reserved for situations where a party argues that immediate harm will occur if a court does not act quickly, which underscores just how urgently Trump’s team is trying to keep the underlying legal fight alive even after the money has already changed hands.
This latest filing did not sit well with Carroll’s legal team, who responded with sharp language of their own in their court filings.
Attorneys for Carroll described the request as “procedurally improper” and “substantively meritless,” arguing that Trump is essentially trying to relitigate a fight he has already lost multiple times over.
Their filings characterized the emergency injunction as one more attempt to delay the consequences of a judgment that has already survived years of appeals, rather than a genuine legal argument with a real chance of success.
Judge Kaplan’s earlier ruling had already anticipated much of this dynamic. In ordering the funds released, he emphasized that a jury had unanimously found Trump liable and awarded Carroll damages accordingly, and that the case had been drawn out far longer than the underlying facts warranted.
His frustration with the pace of the litigation was evident in his written order, and Carroll’s team has since pointed back to that language as evidence that Trump’s newest filing is simply a continuation of the same delay tactics the judge had already called out by name.
Trump Calls the Case Politically Motivated
Trump has been consistent in how he frames the entire legal saga, both in this latest filing and in his public statements following the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear his case.
On his Truth Social platform, he described the lawsuit as a “Fake Case” and said he intended to keep fighting what he characterized as the “weaponization” of the legal system against him.
That language echoes years of similar statements from Trump about the Carroll litigation, in which he has repeatedly argued the case was politically driven rather than grounded in the facts presented at trial.
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team offered a similarly pointed response when asked about the situation, dismissing the lawsuit in a statement as a politically motivated attack rather than a legitimate legal proceeding.
That framing has remained a constant throughout the years-long dispute, even as the case has moved through multiple rounds of appeals, a Second Circuit panel review, and now a request to the Supreme Court that was ultimately turned away.
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