Trump appeals $83.3m E Jean Carroll civil verdict to US Supreme Court 

Personal lawyers for United States President Donald Trump are appealing to the Supreme Court to reject an $83.3m defamation penalty a jury awarded to writer E Jean Carroll.

Separately, representatives for the Department of Justice have filed a similar petition this week, seeking the same end goal.

Both have argued that Trump’s statements against Carroll — who claims the Republican leader sexually assaulted her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store — fall within the bounds of his office’s immunity.

“Absent this Court’s intervention, the sitting President is facing nearly a hundred million dollars of personal liability for conduct that was well within the scope of his federal office,” federal lawyers wrote in their filings.

They pointed to the Westfall Act, which shields federal employees from certain civil lawsuits when an alleged harm is “committed within the scope of their employment”.

Trump’s personal lawyers, meanwhile, suggested that the president’s remarks about Carroll could fall under the precedent set in the 2024 Supreme Court case Trump v United States.

That ruling expanded the concept of presidential immunity.

Previously, presidents enjoyed immunity from prosecution for any actions that fell within their constitutional authority. But after the 2024 case, “presumptive immunity” was extended to anything that could be considered an “official act” of the presidency — a term that was left largely undefined.

The precedent, however, only applies to criminal prosecution. It does not include civil cases, like Carroll’s.

Still, Trump’s personal lawyers have sought to widen the 2024 ruling to include civil proceedings. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan, however, rejected that approach on September 8 of last year.

In appealing to the Supreme Court, Trump’s legal team argued that his statements about Carroll were voiced as part of his presidential interactions with the public and news reporters. They therefore constitute an “official act”, according to Trump’s court filings.

His lawyers also accused lower courts of sidestepping the question of presidential immunity, which was not raised at the early stages of the litigation.

“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,” the Trump team said in its filings.

“Yet, in upholding the exorbitant $83.3 million defamation judgment here, the 2nd Circuit never even decided whether presidential immunity applies to President Trump’s allegedly defamatory statements.”

For years, Trump has fought a pair of defamation lawsuits filed by Carroll. The first was filed in 2019, after Carroll said he damaged her reputation by claiming she lied about the alleged assault for personal gain.

The second came in 2022, after Trump renewed his accusation that Carroll had lied.

In a social media post that year, Trump called her case “phony”, a “complete con job” and a “complete scam”. He added that he had to defend his reputation from “liars, cheaters, and hacks”.

Trump was no longer president at that time, having lost his first re-election bid to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He has since mounted a successful re-election campaign in the 2024 presidential race.

The second defamation case was resolved first. In 2023, a jury awarded Carroll $5m, finding Trump liable for both sexual abuse and defamation, though not rape, as Carroll alleged.

The 2019 civil trial, meanwhile, reached a verdict in January 2024. In that case, a jury awarded $83.3m, much of which came in the form of punitive damages, finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and harming Carroll’s reputation.

Carroll, a former columnist for Elle magazine, first made her accusations about Trump’s behaviour public in a 2019 book called What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.

She gave an account of the Republican leader of cornering her in a department store dressing room in 1996, pulling down her tights and raping her. Trump has denied her accusations, saying, “This woman is not my type.”

In the years since the two jury decisions, Carroll’s lawyers have accused the Trump side of attempting to avoid paying the verdicts.

In June, the Supreme Court declined to hear Trump’s appeal against the initial $5m jury award — which had grown due to accrued interest to nearly $5.8m. A federal judge subsequently ordered the payment to be disbursed this month.

It is unclear whether the Supreme Court will take up Trump’s appeal of the $83.3m defamation verdict.