E. Jean Carroll walks outside Manhattan Federal Court, for the second civil trial after she accused former U.S. President Donald Trump of raping her decades ago, in New York City, U.S., January 25, 2024.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
President Donald Trump and the Department of Justice on Tuesday separately asked the Supreme Court to overturn a civil court verdict that ordered him to pay the writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her 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 in which a court has imposed damages liability on a President for his conduct in office,” the petition to the Supreme Court by Trump’s lawyers says.
His attorneys claim that Trump has immunity from the defamation claim because he made the comments about Carroll in 2019, when he was president. In their filing, the lawyers say that a 2024 Supreme Court ruling in Trump’s favor required the verdict in the Carroll case to be overturned.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in 2024 found that presidents have immunity for official acts, and that “most of a President’s public communications” are official acts.
“Here, the President of the United States has been ordered to pay nearly $100 million in damages — including post-judgment interest — for issuing a press release and answering reporters’ questions, from the White House, defending against attacks on his fitness for office,” Trump’s petition says.
The DOJ’s petition echoes another argument made by Trump’s petition: that the DOJ should have been allowed to substitute the U.S. government for Trump as the defendant in the lawsuit because he was president at the time he made the statements about Carroll.
If that switch had been allowed, the case would have been dismissed because under the Westfall Act, federal employees are shielded from certain civil claims for conduct performed in the course of their duties, including defamation.
The two petitions come a month after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request that it hear his appeal of a $5 million verdict 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 where Trump had deposited funds to secure the verdict.
Despite that, Trump has launched a longshot effort to get the Supreme Court to reconsider its refusal to hear his appeal of the verdict in that case.
In that case, a Manhattan federal court jury in May 2023 found that Trump was liable for having sexually abused Carroll in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s, and for defaming her in late 2022 when he made statements denying her allegations.
In the second case, which is the subject of the new petition to the Supreme Court, another Manhattan federal court jury in January 2024 found Trump civilly liable for defaming Carroll in 2019 when she went public with her claim that Trump had raped her in the dressing room.
That verdict, with its $83.3 million award, was upheld by the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
Trump’s lawyers, in their petition on Tuesday, said the 2nd Circuit “wrongly held that President Trump had somehow forfeited the defense of Presidential immunity solely because his first responsive pleading did not invoke Presidential immunity by name, even though President Trump repeatedly invoked that immunity, including in his answer to the amended complaint and his motion for summary judgment.”
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