The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just put E. Jean Carroll's massive payday on ice, ruling to continue the stay on Donald Trump's $83.3 million defamation judgment while the Supreme Court decides whether to hear his appeal. Carroll, the writer who convinced a Manhattan jury to hand her one of the largest defamation verdicts in American history, is going to have to wait a little longer before she starts redecorating.
Bless her heart. Imagine counting $83.3 million in your head every night before bed, and then a panel of judges says, "Actually, hold on."
The ruling, reported by LifeZette, is a significant blow to what many on the left had treated as a foregone conclusion — that Trump would be forced to write E. Jean Carroll a check the size of a small country's GDP while his legal team was still fighting the case. The Second Circuit wasn't having it. The court ruled that Trump can delay the payout while his appeal works its way through the system, and now the real question lands where it belongs: at the feet of the Supreme Court.
Let's back up for those keeping score at home. A Manhattan jury handed down the $83.3 million verdict against President Trump in January, a number so enormous it practically came with its own zip code. Trump's team was required to post a bond of approximately $100 million — including an additional $7.46 million on top of the judgment — just to keep the appeals process alive.
That's the price of fighting back in a legal system that was weaponized against one man from the moment he rode down the golden escalator.
But here's the part that should tell you everything about how strong Carroll's case really is: her own legal team reportedly did not oppose the delay. Read that again. The people who are supposedly so confident in this verdict that they paraded it across every cable news network didn't even bother fighting to collect the money now. That's not confidence. That's a legal team that knows the ground is shifting underneath them.
The Supreme Court is now weighing whether to take up Trump's appeal, and if they do, the entire Carroll v. Trump saga could get a very different ending than the one MSNBC has been promising its viewers for the last year and a half.
We've seen this movie before. The left finds a sympathetic plaintiff, shops for a friendly jurisdiction, gets a headline-grabbing verdict, and then acts like the case is closed before the ink is dry. They did it with the New York civil fraud case. They did it with every indictment. And every single time, the appeals process has a funny way of reminding everyone that the first verdict isn't always the last word.
As one observer noted on social media, the court "paused Trump's $83 million to E.J. Carroll" — and then pointed out that Carroll never mentioned these allegations in 1996, 1997, or 1998, raising the same questions millions of Americans have had from the beginning.
The $83.3 million figure was always more about politics than justice. It was designed to be a number so big it would dominate a news cycle, so devastating it would cripple a presidential campaign. Instead, Trump posted the bond, kept fighting, and now the Second Circuit has confirmed what his supporters knew all along — this thing is far from over.
The real showdown is at the Supreme Court. And if SCOTUS takes the case, E. Jean Carroll might learn the hard way that a Manhattan jury verdict doesn't mean much when nine justices in Washington start asking harder questions.
Don't spend that money yet, sweetheart. The adults just walked into the room.
