Trump urges Supreme Court to overturn E. Jean Carroll’s US$83M defamation verdict

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday urged the Supreme Court to once again step into his messy legal brawl with magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, appealing an US$83.3 million jury verdict for defamation on the grounds that, as president, he is immune from the litigation. (Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday urged the Supreme Court to once again step into his messy legal brawl with magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, appealing an US$83.3 million jury verdict for defamation on the grounds that, as president, he is immune from the litigation.

The appeal, which has not yet been docketed at the high court, relies heavily on the court’s 2024 decision granting the president wide immunity for actions taken in office.

“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,” Trump’s attorneys told the high court, according to a copy of the appeal reviewed by CNN. “Yet, in upholding the exorbitant $83.3 million defamation judgment here, the Second Circuit never even decided whether presidential immunity applies.”

Trump told the justices that an appeals court decision in Carroll’s favour would “cause significant damage, not only to this president and future presidents” but also the nation.

In addition to raising the prospect that Trump should be immune from the litigation, Trump is also asking the court to review whether the United States government should be the defendant rather than the president.

“Here, the president of the United States has been ordered to pay nearly $100 million in damages … for issuing a press release and answering reporters’ questions, from the White House, defending against attacks on his fitness for office,” his attorneys told the court.

Attorneys for Carroll declined to comment.

The latest appeal comes weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a separate case from Trump in which the president is seeking to unwind a $5 million civil verdict that found he sexually abused and defamed Carroll at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in both cases.

The new appeal involves statements Trump made against Carroll in 2019, when he was president, that a jury found were defamatory and ordered him to pay $83 million in damages. A federal appeals court panel affirmed the damages award, finding it “reasonable in light of the extraordinary and egregious facts” and rejected several of Trump’s legal challenges. Among them, the appeals court found that Trump had previously waived any claim of presidential immunity and said the Supreme Court’s decision in 2024 involving presidential immunity did not alter their view.

The full 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to revisit that decision in late April.

At that time, one of the appeals court judges who sided with Carroll wrote that Trump had first brought up his immunity claims far too late in the litigation.

“Presidential immunity was not raised for the first three years of this case,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin, who was nominated to the bench by U.S. president Barack Obama. Chin also resisted Trump’s effort to have the United States substituted as a defendant, writing that “no other defendant would be permitted to move to substitute the United States in his place, fifteen months after trial and the entry of judgment against him.”

Both Trump and the U.S. Department of Justice signalled at that time that they would appeal to the Supreme Court. The president said he would raise claims of immunity from civil claims for “official acts” as president.

The U.S. Justice Department said that it intended to intervene to effectively take over the case under the Westfall Act, which shields individual federal employees from tort suits for actions taken while they were engaged with their official duties. Normally, that might put federal taxpayers on the hook for an employee’s actions, though in this case it would almost certainly mean the end of Carroll’s defamation case.

Because the Supreme Court is not in session over the summer, it will not consider the president’s appeal until the fall. If it agrees to hear the case, then it would not likely hand down a decision until next June.

Carroll claims Trump defamed her when, in 2019, he denied the assault, said she wasn’t his type, and claimed she made it up to boost sales of a book.

“There were no eyewitnesses, no video evidence, and no police report or investigation,” Trump told the Supreme Court in the appeal he filed last year in the case involving the $5 million verdict. “Instead, Carroll waited more than 20 years to falsely accuse Donald Trump, who she politically opposes, until after he became the 45th president, when she could maximize political injury to him and profit for herself.”

Trump, meanwhile, is continuing to fight a separate, $5 million case involving Carroll. After sitting on Trump’s appeal in that matter for months, the court denied it during the final days of its term last month. Trump has made a long-shot request for the high court to reconsider that decision but a federal judge ordered the release of the money to Carroll.

This story has been updated with additional details.

By Kara Scannell, John Fritze, CNN