President Trump and the Justice Department filed separate petitions Tuesday arguing the $83.3 million defamation verdict against him should be overturned on immunity grounds.
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President Donald Trump and the Justice Department on Tuesday separately asked the Supreme Court to overturn a civil 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.
Trump’s lawyers argued that he has presidential immunity from the defamation claim because the comments about Carroll were made in 2019, while he was 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,” the petition says.
The DOJ petition rests on a separate legal argument. It contends that the U.S. government should have been substituted for Trump as the defendant in the lawsuit because he was president at the time of the statements. Under the Westfall Act, federal employees are shielded from certain civil claims for conduct performed in the course of their duties, including defamation. If that substitution had been allowed, the case would have been dismissed.
The two petitions come a month after the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to hear an appeal of a $5 million verdict in favor of Carroll in a separate but related civil case. Carroll received that money two weeks ago, plus more than $600,000 in interest, from a court fund where Trump had deposited funds to secure the verdict. In that case, a Manhattan federal court jury in May 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s, and for defaming her in late 2022 when he denied her allegations.
The second case, which is the subject of the new petitions, involves a different set of statements. Another Manhattan federal court jury in January 2024 found Trump civilly liable for defaming Carroll in 2019, when she first went public with her claim that he had raped her. That verdict, with its $83.3 million award, was upheld by the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
Trump’s lawyers 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.”
The 2nd Circuit upheld the $83.3 million award.
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