President Trump has asked the Supreme Court to throw out an $83 million defamation judgment awarded to writer E. Jean Carroll, arguing his statements denying her allegations were official presidential acts shielded by immunity.
Trump's legal team filed a certiorari petition contending that the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals used "procedural contortions" to dodge the immunity question, and that no court in American history has ever imposed damages liability on a sitting president for conduct in office. The petition asks the justices to find that Trump's public denials of Carroll's sexual assault claims fell within his duties as president and to allow the federal government to step in as the defendant, which would eliminate Trump's personal financial exposure to the judgment.
The move follows a string of lower-court losses. The 2nd Circuit upheld the verdict last September, ruling that Trump "failed to identify any grounds that would warrant reconsidering our prior holding on presidential immunity" and that the jury's damages were "fair and reasonable." The full appeals court then declined to rehear the case in late April, leaving the Supreme Court as Trump's only remaining avenue.
The core of Trump's argument rests on the Supreme Court's own 2024 presidential immunity decision, which established sweeping protection from prosecution for "official acts", a ruling that effectively shut down then-special counsel Jack Smith's 2020 election probe. Trump's lawyers now want those protections extended to civil liability.
In the petition, Trump's team wrote that "accusations bearing on the President's fitness for office are unquestionably matters of public concern" and that "Presidential statements responding to press questions about such accusations are plainly official." They urged the Court to "say so."
Trump's attorneys also invoked the Westfall Act, a federal statute that allows the government to substitute itself as a defendant when an employee is sued for actions taken within the scope of federal employment. If the Court agreed, taxpayers, not Trump, would bear any financial liability. The Washington Examiner reported that the Department of Justice is actively seeking to invoke the Westfall Act in this case.
The petition characterized the case in historic terms. Trump's lawyers wrote that "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."
The 2nd Circuit was not persuaded. Judge Denny Chin, who authored the April opinion rejecting Trump's appeal, pointed to a basic procedural problem: Trump waited years to raise the immunity defense.
Chin wrote in the opinion that "Presidential immunity was not raised for the first three years of this case." He added:
"The fact of the matter is that no other defendant would be permitted to move to substitute the United States in his place, fifteen months after trial and the entry of judgment against him."
That timeline is central to the legal dispute. Trump's team contends the 2024 Supreme Court immunity ruling changed the legal landscape and justified raising the defense later. The appeals court treated the delay as a forfeiture, a procedural failing that barred the argument regardless of its merits.
A three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit, Judges Chin, Sarah Merriam, and Maria Araújo Khan, held that the trial court committed no errors in its rulings and that the jury's damages were "reasonable in light of the extraordinary and egregious facts of this case." Trump's legal team has been working to consolidate the Carroll cases, a strategy Carroll's own attorneys have warned could threaten both judgments.
This is not the first time Trump has brought the Carroll litigation to the nation's highest court. Just last month, the justices declined, without a single noted dissent, to hear Trump's appeal of a separate $5 million verdict. That case stemmed from a 2023 trial in which a federal jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s and for defaming her in a 2022 social media post in which he called her allegations "a Hoax and a lie" and said "This woman is not my type!"
After the Court turned away that appeal, Carroll's lawyers said the $5 million plus interest was transferred into her account. Carroll's attorneys declined to comment on Trump's latest petition regarding the $83 million judgment.
The unanimous refusal to hear the $5 million case raises an obvious question about whether the Court will view the $83 million petition any differently. Trump's team appears to be betting that the larger damages figure and the explicit immunity framing will compel at least four justices to grant review. Newsmax reported that the Court is not expected to decide whether to take up the case until late September.
The delay means the $83 million judgment remains in legal limbo for months. An appeals court has already delayed enforcement of the payment pending the Supreme Court's review, so Carroll will not collect while the petition is pending.
The Carroll petition fits into a wider legal strategy. Trump has not limited himself to defense. A federal judge recently kept alive Trump's $15 billion defamation suit against the New York Times, signaling that the president is willing to use civil litigation as aggressively as his opponents have used it against him.
The immunity question at the heart of the Carroll case also carries implications well beyond this lawsuit. If the Court agrees that a president's public responses to personal accusations qualify as official acts, it would set a precedent shielding future presidents, of either party, from civil damages for a broad category of public statements. If it declines, the 2nd Circuit's reasoning stands: immunity must be raised promptly, and presidents who wait years to invoke it will be treated like any other litigant who missed a deadline.
The Supreme Court itself has been the subject of intense political attention in recent months. One House Democrat filed an impeachment resolution against Chief Justice John Roberts, though the effort attracted zero co-sponsors, underscoring how far some on the left are willing to go to challenge the Court's legitimacy when its rulings cut against their preferred outcomes.
Whether the justices take this case will reveal something about how seriously they regard the immunity framework they built in 2024. They wrote the rule. Now a president is asking them to apply it. The question is whether procedural timing, not the merits, will be enough to keep the courthouse door shut.
Courts that dodge hard constitutional questions on procedural grounds may keep their dockets tidy, but they leave the law unsettled and the precedent unwritten, and that serves no one except the next litigant willing to test the same boundary.