Trump asks Supreme Court to overturn $83.3 million award in Carroll defamation case

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday asked the Supreme Court to step in and overturn an $83.3 million jury award against him for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of a decades-old sexual assault in a New York City department store.

The president urged the justices to reject the jury’s award, asserting that the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision granting presidents sweeping immunity for actions they take in office shielded him from liability in the case.

Lawyers for Trump asserted that the question of whether he had immunity in the case was “straightforward on the undisputed factual record.” An appeals court had rejected that argument. Trump’s lawyers told the court that if the ruling was allowed to stand, it would cause “significant damage,” harming not only Trump but also future presidents and the nation.

The petition to the justices is the latest turn in Trump’s continued efforts to deny Carroll’s claims and avoid two separate monetary awards that juries ordered him to pay related to Carroll’s allegations that Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and then defamed her in a series of statements and social media posts.

Carroll’s legal team declined a request for comment.

In late June, the Supreme Court rejected a separate request from Trump that the court review a $5 million judgment against him from a previous 2023 jury finding that he had sexually abused and defamed Carroll.

The court’s decision not to hear that case prompted a trial court judge to order that the money, which had been held in escrow while Trump appealed, be paid to Carroll.

Trump’s new petition relates to a far larger judgment awarded by a New York City jury in 2024. That jury awarded Carroll $65 million in punitive damages after determining that Trump had acted with malice in verbally attacking her in social media posts, at news conferences and during the trial. The jury also awarded Carroll $18.3 million in compensatory damages for her suffering.

The Supreme Court is currently on its summer recess, and the justices are not likely to consider whether to take up the case until late September, when they meet for their annual “long conference,” at which they consider thousands of pending petitions — and reject most of them.