Lawyers for President Donald Trump and the Justice Department filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday to have $83.3 million in damages awarded to E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit overturned.
In their petition, Trump’s legal team argued that in upholding the penalty, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals failed to apply the presidential immunity to his statements made during his first term.
Trump had called her claims in her 2019 book — that he had sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in Manhattan during the mid-1990s — a “hoax” that was politically and financially motivated, The New York Times reported.
Trump further stated the Carroll “was trying to sell a new book” that “should be sold in the fiction section,” and that her accusations were “totally false.”
In January 2024, a Manhattan jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million, including $65 million in punitive damages and $18.3 million for her suffering.
Trump’s Tuesday petition to the Supreme Court said the Second Circuit’s ruling “wrongly eviscerates Presidential immunity.”
“This is the first case in our Nation’s history in which a court has imposed damages liability on a President for his conduct in office. Yet, in upholding the exorbitant $83.3 million defamation judgment here, the Second Circuit never even decided whether Presidential immunity applies to President Trump’s allegedly defamatory statements — statements made from the White House, in response to press questions, denying allegations of personal misconduct, directly questioning his fitness for office,” the attorneys argued.
The Second Circuit’s ruling came over a year after the Supreme Court found that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office.
The context of that 2024 case was whether Trump could be held criminally liable for statements he made and actions he took following the 2020 election. The Court held in Trump v. United States that the President is entitled to presumptive immunity for official acts taken while in office when they fall outside his core responsibilities as president.
In their Tuesday petition, Trump’s legal team said the Second Circuit “refused to apply presidential immunity even after this court recognized that ‘most of a president’s public communications are likely to fall comfortably within’ that protection.”
“The Second Circuit instead engaged in procedural contortions to avoid addressing Presidential immunity,” the petition read.
“If left standing, the decision below will cause significant damage, not only to this President and future Presidents, but also to ‘the Nation that the Presidency was designed to serve.’”
SCOTUS Blog reported, “Tuesday’s filing is the second one involving Carroll to come to the justices. On June 29, the Supreme Court turned down Trump’s appeal in a separate [2023] case in which a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll and awarded her $5 million.”
“On July 8, Trump filed a petition for rehearing, asking the justices to consider their denial of review. The court has not yet acted on that petition, although it could do so as soon as Aug. 17. However, Carroll has already received the $5 million award (plus interest), which had been set aside in an escrow account after the verdict.”
Following the 2024 defamation case, in which a jury awarded Carroll the $83.3 million, Trump, who was running for a second term as president, responded on social media, calling the verdict “absolutely ridiculous,” according to The New York Times.
“Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon,” he added, and pledged to appeal. “They have taken away all First Amendment Rights.”
Strengthening Trump’s political weapon argument, New York passed a law in 2023, after he declared his candidacy, that created a one-time, one-year window for those claiming to be victims of sexual assault to bring their cases that fall outside the normal statute of limitations.
Carroll would not have brought her suit otherwise, which stems from the 1990s.
Further, CNN reported in 2019 that Carroll’s account of the sexual assault in a Bergdorf’s dressing room mirrored the plot of a 2012 “Law & Order: SVU” episode.
“It tickled me to death,” she told CNN at the time when this was pointed out to her. “It’s a great, huge coincidence, but it is a magnificent one, I must say.”
“It’s very ironic because ‘Law & Order’ happens to be one of my favorite shows,” Carroll said. “I love ‘Law & Order: Criminal Intent.’”
Finally, Trump argued in a 2024 social media post that Carroll at first said that she was wearing a dress that hadn’t been made yet.
“She originally claimed that the ‘event’ happened in 1994, and that she wore the Donna Karan dress on that day. The problem is that New York Times Fact Checkers found the dress wasn’t even made by Donna Karan until long after 1994. The truth is that she doesn’t know the day, month, season, year, or decade — because it did not happen. End this Witch Hunt now!”
The Daily Mail reported in 2019 that Carroll gave a Donna Karan dress to The New York Times, claiming that Trump assaulted her, but the outlet decided against testing it for DNA.
“We are in the process of returning the dress without doing any sort of testing after concluding that it would not advance our reporting on this subject,” The New York Times’ communications chief Eileen Murphy confirmed in an email to the Daily Mail.
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