A judge has ordered that writer E. Jean Carroll be paid the more than $5 million she is owed by US President Donald Trump after he was found responsible for sexually abusing and defaming her in a civil case three years ago.

Judge Lewis Kaplan on Wednesday ordered a clerk to release the money – with interest – from an account where Trump deposited it after the ruling.

Trump was pushing to delay the $5.8 million payment to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision not to hear an appeal of the case.

In May 2023, a New York jury awarded Carroll damages for her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, later calling the incident a social media hoax. Trump denied the allegations.

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said Wednesday: “The American people stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all witch hunts, including the Democrat-funded Carroll hoax parody.”

“President Trump will continue to win against liberal Lawfare, while continuing to focus on his mission to Make America Great Again,” the spokesperson said.

Later that day, Trump appealed the order to release the funds to a federal appeals court.

Carroll, a former magazine columnist who is now 82, accused Trump of attacking her in the mid-1990s in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan, and then defaming her in Truth Social in a 2022 post in which he denied her accusations.

Trump put the damages into a court-controlled account shortly after the verdict, and they remained there while the appeal process played out. The judge did not say when the funds would be released to Carroll.

The president has repeatedly claimed that the judge who oversaw the civil trial, Lewis Kaplan, improperly allowed evidence to be presented that negatively affected how the jury viewed Trump.

A federal appeals court agreed with the jury’s verdict last year and said Kaplan made no errors that warranted a new trial.

Trump also appealed another jury’s decision in 2024 that found the president liable for defaming Carroll in a separate instance and awarded him nearly $84 million. A panel of federal judges denied his appeal against that decision last year.