President Trump's legal team has asked the Supreme Court to reverse an $83 million defamation verdict won by writer E. Jean Carroll, arguing no president in American history has ever faced damages liability for statements made in office.
Trump's attorneys filed the petition Tuesday, escalating a years-long legal fight to the nation's highest court after the Second Circuit federal appeals court refused to rehear the case in late April. The filing invokes the Supreme Court's landmark 2024 presidential immunity decision and asks the justices to find that Trump's public denials of Carroll's allegations were official acts, shielded from civil liability.
The stakes are not small. The $83.3 million award, handed down by a Manhattan jury in 2024, included $65 million in punitive damages and $18.3 million in compensatory damages, Newsmax reported. If the verdict stands, it would set a precedent allowing private plaintiffs to extract massive judgments from sitting or former presidents for responding to public accusations while in office.
Trump's legal team framed the case in sweeping terms. In the petition, his attorneys wrote:
"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."
They went further, arguing that any president who responds to press questions about accusations "bearing on the President's fitness for office" is performing an official function, and that the courts below dodged the question rather than confronting it.
The petition's sharpest charge targets the Second Circuit's handling of the immunity defense. A three-judge panel rejected Trump's presidential immunity argument in September, ruling he had forfeited the defense by failing to raise it early enough in the litigation, Reuters reported. The full Second Circuit then declined to reconsider.
Trump's lawyers called that reasoning a dodge. In the filing, they accused the appeals court of "procedural contortions to avoid addressing Presidential immunity", a pointed claim that the lower court engineered a way to sidestep the constitutional question rather than rule on its merits.
The argument carries weight beyond this case. If the Second Circuit's approach holds, future courts could use procedural timing rules to block presidential immunity claims before they ever reach a substantive hearing. That is exactly the kind of precedent the Supreme Court's 2024 immunity ruling was designed to prevent.
Trump's attorneys pressed the point in their filing, as the Washington Examiner reported:
"Because accusations bearing on the President's fitness for office are unquestionably matters of public concern, Presidential statements responding to press questions about such accusations are plainly official. This Court should say so."
The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to take up the petition. The justices are not expected to act on the case until late September, though Just The News reported that the Court previously scheduled a closed-door conference for February 20 to consider Trump's appeal of the separate $5 million verdict in the first Carroll lawsuit.
The legal history stretches back years. Carroll accused Trump of sexually abusing her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Trump has consistently and forcefully denied the allegation, calling it false and questioning its timing.
Carroll filed her first lawsuit in 2019. A court awarded her $5 million in 2023 after finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump vowed to keep fighting after the Supreme Court declined last month to rehear that case. He has since paid the $5 million plus accrued interest.
Carroll's second lawsuit, filed in 2022 under New York's Adult Survivors Act, a state law that temporarily reopened the statute of limitations for certain sexual abuse claims, produced the far larger $83.3 million verdict in 2024. That is the judgment now before the Supreme Court.
Trump's lead attorney, Justin D. Smith, has maintained that "President Trump has clearly and consistently denied that this supposed incident ever occurred," AP News reported. Trump himself has argued that the timing of Carroll's accusation was suspicious and helped promote her book tour, and he has disputed key evidence in the case, including the dress Carroll said she was wearing at the time of the alleged assault.
Carroll's attorney, Roberta Kaplan, pushed back on the Supreme Court bid, telling AP News: "We do not believe that President Trump will be able to present any legal issues in the Carroll cases that merit review by the United States Supreme Court."
Alongside Trump's petition, the Department of Justice filed a separate appeal seeking to substitute the U.S. government as the defendant in the case. The legal vehicle is the Westfall Act, a federal law that shields government employees from personal liability for actions taken while doing their jobs.
If the Supreme Court agrees, the practical effect would be significant: Carroll's claim would shift from a personal judgment against Trump to a case against the federal government, which carries different legal standards and different consequences. Lower courts have already rejected the Westfall Act argument, but the DOJ is pressing it independently at the Supreme Court level.
The twin filings, one from Trump's personal legal team, one from the Justice Department, represent a coordinated effort to dismantle the verdict on multiple fronts. The Supreme Court's recent willingness to take up politically significant cases adds weight to the possibility that the justices may grant review.
Trump's attorneys warned in the filing that the damage extends beyond this president. As Fox News reported, the petition argued:
"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."
Separately, Trump's attorneys called the ongoing litigation "deeply damaging to the fabric of our Republic," arguing it is untenable for a sitting president to remain entangled in fighting "decades-old, false allegations and the myriad wrongs throughout this baseless case."
The Supreme Court now holds the only remaining avenue for overturning the $83.3 million verdict. The Second Circuit has ruled. The full appeals court has declined to reconsider. Every lower-court option is spent.
The justices' decision on whether to grant review will likely come in late September. If they take the case, it would mark one of the most direct tests of the 2024 presidential immunity ruling's reach, applied not to a criminal prosecution but to a massive civil damages award. The Court's role in defining the boundaries of presidential power remains one of the defining legal questions of this era.
The core question is narrow but consequential: when a president responds publicly to personal accusations that bear on his fitness for office, is he acting as a private citizen or performing an official function? The answer will shape how every future president handles public allegations, and whether private litigants can turn those responses into nine-figure judgments.
For now, the $83.3 million verdict hangs in the balance. So does a principle that Trump's legal team believes should not be controversial: a president who answers questions from the press about accusations against him is doing his job.
If the courts can punish a president for that, the office itself is weaker, and every future occupant will pay the price.