The Supreme Court hasn’t granted a rehearing petition since 2018, but it redistributed a request from the president to rehear the E. Jean Carroll case. That fact alone should stop everyone who has already moved on to the next headline.
Start with the money — because the money is where this story
gets genuinely explosive. Carroll’s litigation was funded in part by Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn billionaire and major Democratic donor, through a nonprofit called American Future Republic that funneled roughly $7 million to her lawyers. Hoffman’s role stayed hidden until weeks before the first trial. Carroll testified in her 2022 deposition, under oath, that no one else was paying her legal fees. The DOJ is now investigating whether that was perjury.
A federal appeals court ruled Carroll had “plausibly forgotten” who was cutting the checks. Seven million dollars. Plausibly forgotten. You are welcome to believe that if you choose.
The underlying claim rests on Carroll’s allegation that Trump assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room sometime in 1995 or 1996. No police report. No contemporaneous complaint beyond two friends she says she told. No surviving security footage — Bergdorf confirmed it keeps none from that era.
Enter New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which was passed in 2022 and is allowed to be applied retroactively (some say the Democrats who run New York passed it specifically so Carroll could sue Trump). The law created the one-year window that got her claim into court at all. A new statute. Not new evidence.
Trump denied ever meeting Carroll. A 2022 deposition produced the one photo of them together: a receiving line at a 1987 NBC charity event, lasting five or six minutes by Carroll’s own account. Trump’s explanation — that he shook thousands of hands at charity events and couldn’t place every face decades later — is eminently plausible to anyone who has ever worked a receiving line at a large event. A forgotten face in a 35-year-old photo proves nothing about a private dressing room incident.
A sympathetic jury still found Trump liable and awarded Carroll tens of
millions. The Second Circuit upheld it.
Here is Trump’s actual argument to the Supreme Court: the jury never should have heard testimony from other accusers making decades-old allegations, or the 2005 Access Hollywood tape, both admitted as “pattern evidence.” Carroll’s own lawyers concede the case might look different without that evidence — arguing only that her testimony alone was sufficient. That is the entire appeal in one sentence: whether piling on unrelated allegations to prove a specific claim is how American justice is supposed to work.
The rules of evidence exist precisely because our system is built on the principle that you get held liable for what you did — not for who you are or who else says you did something similar. Carroll’s legal team leaned hard on the “who you are” version. It worked.
Brett Kavanaugh nearly lost his Supreme Court seat over an allegation where the accuser couldn’t fix the year, the house, or the guest list, and her own named witness said she had no memory of the event. That standard should apply equally here — not selectively based on who is on the other side of the caption.
The Supreme Court is taking a second look. The DOJ perjury probe is running alongside it. This case isn’t over.
