NEW YORK – She announced it the way someone sends a flare. “THE EAGLE HAS LANDED,” E. Jean Carroll wrote to her Substack readers on Monday, three years and two months after a New York jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually assaulting and defaming her. The $5.62 million that the jury’s verdict had entitled her to collect had finally arrived.
The payment, which carries interest accumulated on the original $5 million 2023 verdict, landed after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s final appeal on June 29. With every avenue of delay closed, the money transferred within days. Carroll, 82, sent the word to her subscribers and moved on.
“Three years ago, a unanimous nine-person jury found President Trump liable for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll,” said Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lead attorney. “Now, justice has been done.”
Carroll first accused Trump of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room on Fifth Avenue sometime in the mid-1990s. She went public with the account in her 2019 book, “What Do We Need Men For?” Trump responded with denials and public attacks on her credibility, insisting the encounter never occurred and that Carroll had invented it for attention. A jury disagreed. Nine people deliberated for fewer than three hours in May 2023 and returned a finding of liability for sexual abuse and defamation. The damages were set at $5 million.
What followed was three years of legal delay. Trump’s legal team had argued for presidential immunity, appealed the verdict through the federal courts, and eventually petitioned the Supreme Court. The court declined to intervene. The interest clock ran, bringing the balance from $5 million to $5.62 million. On Monday, Carroll confirmed the figure had cleared.
She had previewed the mood six weeks earlier. On June 29, when the Supreme Court first announced its rejection of Trump’s appeal, Carroll posted to followers: “WE WON! THIS WIN IS FOR EVERY WOMAN IN THE WORLD!” The message Monday had a different temperature, quieter, but her note to subscribers included a sardonic passage of thanks for Alina Habba, Trump’s former lead defense attorney. Habba’s courtroom performance during the 2023 trial drew withering assessments from legal commentators, several of whom concluded that her aggressive cross-examination of Carroll had done more to win juror sympathy for the plaintiff than for the defendant.
Trump’s office did not issue a public comment on the transfer. His legal team had spent three years arguing the verdict was built on flawed evidence and improper jury instructions. Those arguments did not persuade the appellate courts, and they did not persuade the Supreme Court. The former president, who called the 2023 verdict a shame and continued publicly denying Carroll’s account even after the jury ruled, sent the money.
The $5.62 million does not represent the total extent of Trump’s legal exposure to Carroll. A second defamation trial in January 2024, arising from statements Trump made after the first verdict, resulted in a jury ordering him to pay $83 million. That judgment is currently before the Supreme Court on appeal. Whether Trump’s team will pursue it to a final ruling or seek a settlement is not yet clear. Carroll has not publicly stated what outcome she expects or what she intends to do with either sum.
The case, as CBS News first reported, has traced a long arc from the Bergdorf Goodman encounter Carroll described to the payment that arrived Monday. Carroll filed the original lawsuit in November 2019. The trial did not open until four years later, and the collection fight required three more years beyond that. Along the way, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s immunity arguments, the appeals courts affirmed the verdict, and the legal resistance came to nothing.
The dressing room encounter, as Carroll has described it across her book, court testimony, and interviews, began with a chance meeting at the store, Trump’s suggestion that she help him choose a gift, the move to the lingerie section, and then a dressing room where Carroll says Trump pushed her against the wall and assaulted her. What she alleges happened there is what the jury evaluated in 2023, and what Trump denied then and has continued to deny since. The jury’s verdict stands. The appeals are exhausted.
What Carroll plans to do next, whether she writes further about the experience, continues advocacy work, or waits to see how the $83 million appeal concludes, she has not yet said. The payment is the record of where things stand on this particular count. For three years after a federal jury decided the question, the answer existed only on paper. On Monday afternoon in July 2026, it became real. The eagle, as Carroll put it, has landed.
