The money is no longer sitting safely inside a court-controlled account—and Donald Trump wants it back before it moves beyond his reach.

In an urgent legal filing, the president’s attorneys demanded that writer E. Jean Carroll return millions of dollars she collected after defeating Trump in court. They warned that her decision to invest the funds for retirement could make the money “irretrievable” if Trump somehow succeeds in reviving an appeal that has already been rejected repeatedly.

Carroll’s lawyers fired back with equal force, accusing Trump of launching yet another attempt to delay the consequences of a case he has been fighting for years.

At stake is $5 million awarded by a federal jury in 2023, plus interest that reportedly pushed the total to approximately $5.8 million.

The jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a New York department store during the 1990s and for defaming her after she publicly accused him. Trump has denied her allegations and repeatedly challenged the verdict.

Those challenges have failed at nearly every level.

“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 attorneys wrote in their latest filing.

The money remained in a secure court account while Trump pursued his appeals. But on June 29, the Supreme Court declined to hear his case. Carroll collected the full amount by July 14, according to the court records described in the report.

Then the legal battle took another dramatic turn.

Carroll’s attorneys disclosed that the funds had been invested in a retirement account. Trump’s lawyers argued that this represented a significant departure from previous assurances that the money would be placed in a conventional interest-bearing account.

They called the move a “bait-and-switch.”

According to Trump’s legal team, Carroll relied on the promise of a secure account while opposing an earlier emergency request. Once the funds were released from court control, they argued, she moved them into investments that may fluctuate in value or be distributed.

“Now that the funds have been released, they are investments for her retirement,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.

They claimed that the money is now subject to Carroll’s decisions and pointed to past public remarks in which she discussed potentially using money recovered from Trump to benefit others.

“President Trump faces irreparable harm,” his lawyers argued.

They are asking the appeals court to order Carroll to return the money to the Court Registry Investment System, where it had remained protected since 2023.

Carroll’s team described the demand as legally baseless and procedurally extraordinary.

“This extraordinary request is procedurally improper, substantively meritless,” her attorneys wrote, accusing Trump of inventing another argument whenever a previous effort to delay the case failed.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan has previously expressed similar frustration. According to the filing, Kaplan said Trump “has been stalling this case for years.”

Carroll’s lawyers said the latest effort marks Trump’s seventh appeal across two related cases. In a separate trial, another jury awarded Carroll substantially more for additional defamatory statements. The current fight, however, centers on the approximately $5.8 million already released following the first verdict.

Trump is now asking the Supreme Court to reconsider its refusal to hear his appeal. Such requests are rarely successful. Carroll’s attorneys estimated that the procedure succeeds only about 0.08% of the time.

That means Trump’s argument depends on an exceptionally unlikely reversal: The Supreme Court would need to reconsider its denial, reopen the dispute and ultimately provide him with a path toward overturning the judgment.

His lawyers nevertheless insist that the funds must be protected while that possibility remains alive.

Carroll’s attorneys have asked the appeals court to wait until the Supreme Court decides whether to reconsider. Trump’s team says the court must act immediately, before the investments change or the money is distributed.

The escalating fight creates a striking reversal.

For years, Carroll waited while Trump challenged the verdict through layer after layer of the federal court system. Now that she has finally obtained the money, Trump argues that allowing her to use it could cause him permanent harm.

The appeals court must decide whether that concern justifies ordering a successful plaintiff to surrender funds she collected after the Supreme Court refused to intervene.

For Carroll, the money is now part of her retirement. For Trump, it represents a judgment he continues to insist should never have been paid.

And with his final legal options rapidly shrinking, the battle has moved beyond who won the case.

It is now a desperate fight over whether the winner gets to keep the money.