UE. Jean Carroll walks outside Manhattan Federal Court, the second civil trial after she accused former US President Donald Trump of rape decades ago, in New York City, US, on January 25, 2024.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
President Donald Trump and the Justice Department on Tuesday separately asked the Supreme Court to reverse a civil court ruling that ordered him to pay author E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defamation while denying her claim that he sexually assaulted her in a New York department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
“This is the first case in our nation’s history where a court has held the President accountable for his conduct in office,” said the petition to the Supreme Court by Trump’s lawyers.
His lawyers say Trump does not have a claim for defamation because he made comments about Carroll in 2019, when he was president. In their papers, the lawyers say the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in favor of Trump requires that the ruling in the Carroll case be overturned.
A Supreme Court decision in 2024 found that presidents are immune from official acts, and that “most of the President’s public communications” are official acts.
“Here, the President of the United States is ordered to pay nearly $100 million in damages – including post-judgment interest – for issuing a press release and answering questions from reporters, from the White House, defending the attack on his eligibility for office,” Trump’s petition said.
The DOJ’s request is consistent with another argument made by Trump’s request: that the DOJ should have been allowed to add the US government instead of Trump as a defendant in the case because he was president when he made the statements about Carroll.
Had that change been allowed, the case would have been dismissed because under the Westfall Act, public employees are protected from certain civil claims for conduct committed while performing their duties, including defamation.
The two appeals come a month after the Supreme Court denied Trump’s request to hear his request for a $5 million judgment in favor of Carroll in a separate, but related, civil case.
Carroll two weeks ago received that money, in addition to more than $600,000 in interest, from a court fund in which Trump had deposited funds to defend the judgment.
Still, Trump has begun a long-running effort to get the Supreme Court to reconsider its refusal to hear his request to appeal the ruling in that case.
In that case, a Manhattan federal court judge in May 2023 found Trump guilty of sexually assaulting Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman store dressing room in the 1990s, and of defaming her in late 2022 when she made statements denying the allegations.
In the second case, which is the subject of a new appeal to the Supreme Court, another Manhattan federal court judge in January 2024 found Trump guilty of defamation against Carroll in 2019 when he went public with her claim that Trump had raped her in the dressing room.
That decision, with its $83.3 million award, was upheld by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.
Trump’s attorneys, in their filing Tuesday, said the 2nd Circuit “wrongly held that President Trump somehow lost his immunity defense because his initial petition did not invoke presidential immunity by name, despite President Trump’s repeated requests for that immunity, including in his answer to the amended complaint and his brief.”
