Trump asks the Supreme Court to overturn the $83.3 million judgment for defaming E. Jean Carroll

President Donald Trump filed a petition with the Supreme Court on Tuesday to overturn an $83.3 million verdict handed down by a jury in 2024, which found him liable for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll. The request is the latest in a series of legal attempts by the president to avoid paying two separate civil judgments related to Carroll's allegations, in which she accuses him of sexually assaulting her in a fitting room at the New York department store Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s.

The central argument of Trump's defense relies on the 2024 Supreme Court ruling, which granted presidents broad immunity for actions taken in the exercise of their office. According to the president's attorneys, that immunity should shield him from civil liability in this case, since the statements he made about Carroll constituted, in their view, "official presidential statements." That argument had already been rejected in September by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which unanimously upheld the 2024 jury verdict. A subsequent petition for review before the full court was also denied in April.

Separately, the Department of Justice filed its own petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, according to a filing reviewed by The New York Times. Carroll's legal team did not respond to the newspaper's requests for comment.

The $83.3 million judgment, comprising $65 million in punitive damages and $18.3 million in compensatory damages, was handed down by a Manhattan jury in 2024, which found that Trump had acted maliciously when publicly referring to Carroll on social media, at press conferences, and during the trial itself. This is a separate lawsuit from the one in 2023, when another jury had already found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, awarding $5 million in damages, which Trump had already paid after the Supreme Court intervened in that case last June. Despite that payment, the new filing also requests reconsideration of the June decision.

The Supreme Court is currently in summer recess. The justices are not expected to consider whether to take the case until late September, when they convene for their traditional annual "long conference," during which they typically rule on thousands of pending petitions.

Trump has previously described both verdicts as part of a political witch hunt against him, while Carroll has maintained her allegations throughout the various legal proceedings. Neither party made any additional statements following this week's filing.