President Donald Trump is again asking the Supreme Court to intervene in his yearslong legal battle with writer E. Jean Carroll, this time arguing that he should not have to pay an $83.3 million jury award on the grounds of presidential immunity.
Lawyers for Trump urged the high court to review the case and consider overturning the jury’s ruling in 2024 that found he defamed Carroll after he repeatedly denied that he sexually abused her in a dressing room in 1996.
“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 lawyers wrote in the filing, calling the $83.3 million award “exorbitant.”
“If left standing, the decision below will cause significant damage, not only to this President and future Presidents, but also to ‘the Nation that the Presidency was designed to serve,’” they wrote.
Carroll sued Trump in 2019 over allegations that he defamed her during his first term in office, including when he said she made up the allegations of sexual abuse to sell more copies of her upcoming book.
Trump’s lawyers argued Tuesday that under the Westfall Act, a federal statute that protects government employees from certain lawsuits while they are engaged in their official duties, Trump should be able to swap out his name as the defendant in the case and replace it with the U.S. government.
If it is applied, the act would essentially nullify Carroll’s case, since the U.S. government cannot be sued for defamation.
“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,” the filing said.
Trump’s lawyers argued that the “threat of even a single damages judgment based on official acts will render all Presidents ‘unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out [their] duties for fear that [they] may be next.’”
Trump asked a federal appeals court to consider his argument for presidential immunity in the case in April when his lawyers requested a rehearing before a full bench of judges.
The appeals court denied the request, as did a three-judge panel that rejected an appeal from Trump in September that was based on presidential immunity.
Trump’s lawyers pushed back against the appeals court’s ruling in the filing Tuesday, citing the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision on presidential immunity.
The filing said the appeals court “refused to apply Presidential immunity even after this Court recognized that ‘most of a President’s public communications are likely to fall comfortably within’ that protection.”
Carroll’s legal team declined to comment on the petition Tuesday evening.
The Supreme Court denied Trump’s request last month to review a separate successful defamation lawsuit filed by Carroll.
That case, which was filed in 2022 after her initial lawsuit was delayed by legal questions, focused on the sexual abuse itself and on claims that Trump defamed her after he left office. A jury awarded Carroll $5 million in the second case in 2023.
Carroll collected the award from that judgment this month after Trump tried repeatedly to block the payment in court. Trump has denied all wrongdoing in both cases.
