President Donald Trump has filed urgent court motions this week seeking to force writer E. Jean Carroll to return a $5 million defamation and sexual abuse judgment, arguing that her decision to invest the payout in a retirement account has made the funds "irretrievable."

A federal jury found Trump liable in 2023 for sexually abusing Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in 1996 and for defaming her after she came forward with the allegations, according to the Associated Press. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million, which grew to $5.8 million with interest, court records show. A separate jury later awarded Carroll an additional $83.3 million in a related defamation case over Trump's denials of the assault, bringing the total judgments across both cases to nearly $90 million.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Trump's appeal on June 29, and Carroll collected the full amount by July 14. Carroll's attorneys have stated that she placed the funds into a retirement investment account.

"Defendant has lost before a jury, the district court, a unanimous Second Circuit panel, the full Second Circuit, en banc, and the Supreme Court of the United States," Carroll's lawyers wrote in a court filing, noting that this was Trump's seventh appeal across two related cases. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan previously remarked that Trump "has been stalling this case for years."

Trump petitioned the Supreme Court to reconsider its denial — a procedural move that succeeds approximately 0.08% of the time, according to Carroll's filing. Separately, he asked a federal appeals court to order Carroll to return the money.

Carroll's legal team had earlier represented to the court that the funds would be deposited into a plain interest-bearing account. Trump's lawyers seized on the discrepancy, calling it a "bait-and-switch" in a July 27 filing.

"Now that the funds have been released, they are investments for her retirement," Trump's attorneys wrote. They argued that Carroll used the promise of a secure account to block an emergency court order and then redirected the money into stock market investments once it was outside the court's control.

"That reversal is devastating to Plaintiff's opposition," Trump's lawyers wrote. They further argued that the funds are now "subject to Plaintiff's whims," citing what they described as her "publicly announced plans to distribute money recovered from President Trump to third parties."

"President Trump faces irreparable harm," his lawyers declared, demanding that Carroll return the money to the Court Registry Investment System, the secure court-controlled account where it had been held since 2023.

Carroll's legal team pushed back forcefully. "This extraordinary request is procedurally improper, substantively meritless, and yet another example of Defendant's pattern of 'slow-roll[ing] his defenses, asserting or inventing a new one each time his prior effort to delay the case fails,'" her lawyers wrote.

Trump's rehearing petition has been distributed for a Supreme Court conference. Carroll has asked the federal appeals court to hold the motion seeking the money's return until the Supreme Court acts. Trump's lawyers have urged the court to rule immediately.

Primary sources: PBS NewsHour, Court Filing — July 27, 2025 (PDF), Court Filing — Carroll Response (PDF)