Trump to ask Supreme Court to toss $83 million award to E. Jean Carroll
The court is still sitting on an appeal from Trump in a related case.
Maureen GroppeWASHINGTON − President Donald Trump’s lawyers told the Supreme Court on June 2 that they will soon be appealing the $83.3 million jury award Trump was ordered to pay to writer E. Jean Carroll after denying he sexually assaulted her.
The court has been sitting for months on Trump’s appeal in a related case about an additional $5 million a jury said Trump must pay Carroll.
In a letter to the court, Trump’s lawyers said the justices may want to wait to act on that appeal until getting the second one within the next month.
Both cases are part of a legal battle between Trump and Carroll that dates to 2019 and includes two civil trials.
Carroll said in 2019 that Trump sexually assaulted her at a New York City department store in 1996, and Trump fired back with allegations that she was making up the story to sell her book.
Carroll sued him months later, eventually winning the $83.3 million judgment for damages.
As the case was ongoing, Trump repeated the denial in a 2022 social media post. Carroll then sued Trump again under a special window of time that New York granted to sexual abuse survivors, and in 2023, a New York jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse against Carroll. This resulted in the $5 million verdict.
Federal appeals courts upheld both judgments.
In September, the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of appeals said the $83.3 million judgement was reasonable “in light of the extraordinary and egregious facts of this case.”
Trump’s repeated comments about Carroll resulted in “a multitude of death threats and other threats of physical injury,” the appeals court said. The jury was allowed to find that Trump would not stop defaming Carroll unless he was hit with a substantial financial penalty, the court continued.
Since that ruling, the Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into people involved in the civil lawsuits brought by Carroll.
Although Carroll’s suit against Trump involved events long before his presidency, Trump’s lawyers previously told the Supreme Court that it’s “deeply damaging to the fabric of our Republic for President Trump, in the midst of a historic presidency, to have to take his focus away from his singular and unique duties as Chief Executive to continue fighting against decades-old, false allegations and the myriad wrongs throughout this baseless case.”
“This mistreatment of a President cannot be allowed to stand,” they wrote in the first appeal, which has been pending since January.