Trump Calls on SCOTUS to Dismiss E. Jean Carroll Sexual Abuse Verdict
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a jury’s finding in a civil lawsuit that he sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s and then defamed her.
Trump’s lawyers argued in a lengthy filing before the high court that the allegations that led to the $5 million verdict were “underpinned” by a “series of indefensible evidentiary failures” that allowed Carroll’s lawyers to present “highly inflammatory propensity evidence” against him.
Carroll, a longtime advice columnist and former TV talk show host, testified at a trial in 2023 that Trump turned a friendly encounter in the spring of 1996 into a violent attack in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman, an upscale store across from Trump Tower.
The jury also found Trump responsible for defaming Carroll when he made comments in October 2022 denying her accusation.
via News
Trump’s lawyers, led by St. Louis, Missouri-based attorney Justin D. Smith, called Carroll’s claims a “politically motivated hoax.”
They accused trial judge Lewis A. Kaplan of distorting federal evidentiary rules to bolster Carroll’s “implausible and baseless claims.” They said that in upholding the verdict, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was in conflict with other federal appeals courts over how those rules should be applied.
“President Trump has clearly and consistently denied that this alleged incident ever occurred,” Smith and his co-counsel wrote. “No physical or DNA evidence corroborates Carroll’s story. There were no eyewitnesses, no video evidence, and no police report or investigation.”
A message seeking comment was left with Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan.
In September, when Trump’s lawyers first indicated they would appeal to the Supreme Court, she said, “We do not believe that President Trump can raise any legal issues in the Carroll cases that merit review by the United States Supreme Court.”
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said in a statement that the appeal to the Supreme Court was part of the president’s crusade against “liberal law.”
“The American people stand with President Trump as he demands an immediate end to all witch hunts, including the Democrat-funded Carroll hoax travesty,” the statement said.
A three-judge appeals panel upheld the verdict in December 2024, rejecting Trump’s claims that Judge Kaplan’s rulings derailed the trial, including by allowing two other Trump sexual abuse accusers to testify. The women said Trump committed similar acts against them in the 1970s and in 2005. Trump denied the three women’s allegations.
In June, Second Circuit judges denied Trump’s request for the full appeals court to take up the case. That left Trump with two options: accept the result and allow Carroll to collect the judgment, which he had previously paid in escrow, or continue fighting in the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority — including three of his own appointees — might be more open to considering his challenge.
Trump skipped the 2023 trial but testified briefly in a follow-up defamation trial last year that ended with a jury ordering him to pay Carroll an additional $83.3 million. The second trial was the result of comments then-President Trump made in 2019 after Carroll first publicly made the allegations in a memoir.
Judge Kaplan presided over both trials and ordered the second jury to accept the first jury’s conclusion that Trump had sexually abused Carroll. Judge Kaplan and Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, are not related.
In their Supreme Court filing, Trump’s lawyers said Kaplan compounded his “significant evidentiary errors” in the first trial by “improperly preventing” Trump from challenging the first jury’s finding that he had sexually abused Carroll, leading to an “unjust $83.3 million judgment.”
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The Second Circuit upheld that verdict on Sept. 8, with a three-judge panel calling the jury’s damage awards “just and reasonable.” Trump has since asked the full appeals court to hear arguments and reconsider the ruling.
Trump has recently had success defending himself against costly civil judgments. In August, a New York appeals court overturned Trump’s staggering sentence in a state civil fraud lawsuit.
The News does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.