Carroll, a journalist known for writing a popular advice column for Elle for 27 years, filed her lawsuit in 2022. She alleged that Trump had sexually abused her in a dressing room at a New York department store in 1996 and that he had defamed her in a 2022 social media post calling her accusations, among other things, a “complete con job” and a “Hoax.” Carroll relied on a New York state law enacted that year, which gave adult victims of sexual abuse one year to sue their abusers, even if it would have otherwise been too late to do so.
A jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll and awarded her $5 million. Trump appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which upheld the verdict and later declined to reconsider the case.
Trump came to the Supreme Court in November 2025, asking the justices to weigh in. Emphasizing that he had “clearly and consistently denied that this supposed incident ever occurred,” Trump contended that the lower courts should not have allowed Carroll’s lawyers to introduce three pieces of evidence: testimony by two women, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, who alleged in 2016 that Trump had assaulted them – on an airplane in 1979 and at Trump’s home in Florida in 2005; and the “Access Hollywood” tape – a 2005 recording that surfaced shortly before the 2016 election, in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.
Carroll countered that the 2nd Circuit had held, and Trump does not contest, that even if the district court had been wrong to admit the three pieces of evidence, it ultimately wouldn’t have made a difference “taking the record as a whole and considering the strength of Ms. Carroll’s case.” Therefore, she argued, the Supreme Court should deny review.
Trump’s petition for review was initially slated for consideration at the justices’ private conference in late February, but the justices did not actually consider it until last week, when they denied it without comment.
The court granted six petitions for review, on topics ranging from election law to parental rights. They are:
- RiseandShine Corp. v. PepsiCo, involving whether a trademark’s “inherent strength” is a question of law, which a judge decides, or instead a question of fact, which is normally decided by a jury.
- Hoffmann v. WBI Energy Transmission, involving how to determine “just compensation” when a private entity uses the federal power of eminent domain to obtain rights of way to construct natural gas pipelines.
- International Partners for Ethical Care v. Ferguson, a case about whether parents have a right to challenge Washington laws allowing runaway teens to receive mental health care and treatment (including as to gender transitions of their children) at licensed shelters without parental consent.
- Wassily v. Blanche, involving whether noncitizens who receive asylum but whose asylum is later terminated can become lawful permanent residents or are instead always ineligible.
- Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, a challenge to Arizona’s requirement of proof of citizenship for applicants using the state’s voter-registration form, as well as whether a federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, allows states to remove noncitizens from its voting rolls within 90 days of a federal election.
- Montoya Palacios v. Liggins, a case about whether a petition for habeas corpus that challenges civil immigration detention is a “civil action” under the Equal Access to Justice Act, so that a detainee who prevails in such a case could be eligible for attorney’s fees if the government’s position was not “substantially justified.”
The court called for the views of the U.S. solicitor general in a pair of related cases, Republican National Committee v. Eakin and Pennsylvania v. Eakin, challenges to a Pennsylvania law that requires mail-in voters to write the date on their ballot by hand. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit struck down the law. There is no deadline for the federal government to file its brief.
Over written dissents, the court also denied review in several noteworthy cases. In Dershowitz v. Cable News Network, the justices declined to hear a petition for review filed by Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who represented Trump during his first impeachment trial before the Senate in January 2020. Dershowitz went to federal court in Florida, where he argued that CNN defamed him by deliberately misrepresenting statements that he made during the proceeding.
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision not to take up Dershowitz’s case, in an opinion joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. He would have granted review and reconsidered the court’s landmark 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan, which held that to prevail on a defamation claim, public figures must show that the statement on which the claim is based was both false and made with “actual malice” – that is, either knowing that it was false or with reckless disregard for whether it was false. Such a standard, Thomas argued, “‘bears “no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution.”’”
In Smith v. Kind, the Supreme Court rejected a request from an inmate who was sprayed with pepper spray – although the correctional officer who did so knew that he had a “medical contraindication” to the spray – and placed naked in a cold cell for 23 hours to review a federal appeals court’s determination that the correctional officers were entitled to qualified immunity. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit “conclude[d] that a jury could find that both actions … lacked a legitimate penological purpose and thus violated the Eighth Amendment,” which bans cruel and unusual punishment. However, it continued, because the inmate, Antonio Smith, could not point to cases involving the same facts, therefore it could not have been “clearly established” that the officers’ conduct violated Smith’s rights.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, in an opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She called the 7th Circuit’s “grant of qualified immunity … clearly wrong” and indicated that she would reverse that ruling without additional briefing or oral argument. The Supreme Court, she wrote, “has emphasized that ‘“clearly established law” should not be defined “at a high level of generality”’ and that courts should look to prior cases involving ‘similar circumstances,’ but this analysis does not permit discarding every case that presents any factual variation.” “A ‘body of relevant case law’ may clearly establish those contours even if no single case, on its own, presents identical facts.” In this case, Sotomayor stressed, “even without a case matching the exact conditions that Smith faced …, the body of case law on needless deprivations of warmth in prisons made it abundantly clear, and beyond debate, that the officers’ treatment of Smith violated the Eighth Amendment.”
And in Doe v. Hochul, the court turned down a petition for review from New York healthcare workers who were denied a religious accommodation from the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers and lost their jobs when they were not vaccinated.
In an opinion joined by Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, Gorsuch dissented, arguing that the case “raises an important and recurring question of federal law that warrants this Court’s attention.” “I fail to see,” Gorsuch emphasized, “how a state law (especially an unconstitutional state law) prohibiting an accommodation can always and automatically supply an employer with a” defense that accommodating the employee’s religious observance or practice would place an “undue hardship” on the employer’s business.
