Donald Trump has asked Judge Lewis Kaplan not to release more than $5 million in court-held funds owed to E Jean Carroll from her 2023 sexual abuse and defamation verdict, arguing that a pending petition for Supreme Court rehearing should pause any disbursement The Guardian.

The dispute centers on money Trump himself placed in escrow. About six weeks after Carroll's 2023 trial win, Trump deposited the jury award plus 11% interest into a court-controlled account, a step taken while his appeals proceeded rather than as an admission of liability The Guardian. With interest accrued, that account now holds roughly $5.8 million.

The immediate trigger was the Supreme Court's June 29, 2026 decision not to take up Trump's appeal, exhausting — in Carroll's view — the ordinary appellate track and satisfying the condition for release under a June 2023 agreement between the parties. Roberta Kaplan, Carroll's lead attorney, has cited that agreement directly: it specified the funds would be released upon certain definitive legal developments, including a Supreme Court denial of certiorari The Guardian. Carroll's team moved fast. On June 30, 2026, one day after the denial, they filed with Judge Kaplan in the Southern District of New York asking him to order the funds released UPI CNN.

Trump's counter move came a week later. His lawyers point to a July 6, 2026 petition asking the Supreme Court to reconsider its own denial — a rehearing petition, a procedurally rare and rarely granted vehicle — and argue that releasing the funds before that petition is resolved would inflict "irreparable harm" on their client The Guardian. They further contend that Carroll's team has misread the 2023 agreement, asserting it "does not permit collection while the rehearing petition remains unresolved." On that basis, Trump is asking Kaplan either to deny Carroll's release motion outright or to delay ruling on it.

The record so far has not gone Trump's way procedurally. A federal judge already rejected a Trump request to delay his response to Carroll's release motion USA Today, and by July 6, 2026 a separate effort to stall the payout had also been denied Yahoo News. CNBC's July 1 reporting confirms the scale of what's at stake: Carroll is seeking release of nearly $5.8 million held since the 2023 verdict CNBC. Lower courts had already repeatedly rejected Trump's underlying appeal before the case reached the Supreme Court, meaning the current fight is not about the merits of Carroll's claim but about the mechanics and timing of collection The Guardian.

The case, formally Carroll v. Trump, 1:22-cv-10016 in the Southern District of New York — known in filings as "Carroll II" to distinguish it from Carroll's earlier defamation suit — was filed November 24, 2022, and the district court entered final judgment by May 11, 2023 CourtListener. The appeal was docketed at the Second Circuit as case 23-793 CourtListener. Docket activity has continued past judgment, with the most recent filing dated July 4, 2026 CourtListener, reflecting the ongoing satellite litigation over the escrowed funds even as the substantive appeal has run its course.

What Trump is now litigating is less about whether he owes the money — the verdict stands, certiorari has been denied, and rehearing petitions before the Supreme Court succeed only rarely — and more about the narrow question of contractual timing embedded in the 2023 escrow agreement. That agreement was negotiated by sophisticated counsel on both sides specifically to define trigger events for release, and the dispute now turns on whether a rehearing petition falls inside or outside those triggers. Judge Kaplan's read of that contractual language, rather than any fresh assessment of Carroll's underlying claims, will determine whether the funds move in the near term.

The pattern of successive denials — of delay requests, of stay requests — suggests the court has been unreceptive to procedural stalling, even as it has not yet ruled on the substantive release motion itself. Whether that skepticism carries over into the release ruling is the open question, and it will likely turn on how narrowly or broadly Kaplan construes "definitive legal developments" as that phrase was used in 2023, well before either side anticipated a rehearing petition would enter the picture.