Carroll Fires Back as Trump Asks Supreme Court to Wipe Out $83m Verdict

E Jean Carroll's legal team isn't letting Donald Trump's last-ditch Supreme Court play go unanswered. In a filing dated 30 October, her lawyers urged the justices to reject Trump's request that they hear his appeal of the $83m damages verdict she won. The message, blunt as it gets: the court doesn't need to rescue the president from his own courtroom decisions.

That $83m award landed on 26 January 2024, less than a year after a separate jury handed Carroll $5m in her sexual abuse and defamation case against Trump. The second trial dealt only with damages, following a first jury finding that Trump sexually abused and defamed the former Elle columnist. Trump has denied all wrongdoing throughout.

Trump's argument rests on presidential immunity, which his lawyers say covers conduct during his time in office, including 2019 statements where he called Carroll a liar. They warned that without Supreme Court intervention, the sitting president faces nearly $100m in personal liability for conduct they say fell within his federal office, and argued the threat of such exposure would chill future presidents. A review, they wrote, would protect the institution of the presidency rather than Trump himself.

Carroll's attorneys, led by Roberta Kaplan, pointed out that lower courts have repeatedly upheld the verdict, undercutting Trump's plea. They described seven years of litigation spanning five appeals, eight stay motions and six days of trial, all carried out while Carroll absorbed what they called increasingly vicious accusations and thousands of threats of death and sexual violence from Trump's followers. His defamatory statements, they said, set off a domino effect of attacks on Twitter, Facebook and in her inbox. As her filing put it, the president may want the court's help, but the presidency doesn't need it.

This isn't Trump's first swing at the Supreme Court over Carroll. In September he agreed to stop fighting the first jury verdict after the justices once again declined to take up his appeal. The case traces back to Carroll's claim that Trump attacked her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store decades ago, an allegation that went public in a June 2019 New York magazine excerpt from her book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.

Asked about the new filing, a spokesman for Trump's legal team said the American people stand with the president and want an immediate end to what he called witch hunts, including the Carroll case. Trump, the spokesman added, will keep winning against what he described as liberal lawfare. Now it's up to the justices to decide whether they want any part of it.