Trump argues that his immunity extends to E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuits
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump and writer E. Jean Carroll are arguing over whether a Supreme Court decision affording him substantial criminal immunity also shields him from having to pay tens of millions in damages for insulting her and saying she lied about his sexually assaulting her.
Trump made his arguments last year in his appeal of the $83.3 million verdict by a jury that found him liable for defaming Carroll in 2019 after she accused him of a decades-old attack. On Monday, Carroll pushed sharply back.
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Her lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, argued in a brief that Trump’s view of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which protected him from charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, was too expansive. His statements calling Carroll’s accusation “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie,” were strictly personal, she wrote. She said they fell far outside the boundaries of the official acts that presidential immunity protects.
“If there were ever a case where immunity does not shield a president’s speech, this one is it,” Kaplan said in her brief.
The dispute over the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, which addressed the scope of a president’s immunity from prosecution, comes as Trump has seen criminal cases against him in two states come to an end, and a third delayed indefinitely. In a fourth case, in New York, after Trump was found guilty of 34 counts in a trial stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn actor, the judge imposed no jail time.
But Carroll’s legal battle with Trump — fought in two lawsuits spanning more than half a decade and now based in the federal appeals court for the 2nd Circuit in Manhattan — continues to move forward.
“Presidential immunity forecloses any liability here and requires the complete dismissal of all claims,” Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, said in an appeals brief in September, citing the Supreme Court decision of last summer. (Trump has since chosen Sauer to serve in his administration as the U.S. solicitor general.)
Last month, the 2nd Circuit appeals court upheld a $5 million judgment against Trump in the other lawsuit that Carroll filed against him in Manhattan.
In that case, a federal jury in May 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. It also found that he had defamed her when, in 2022, he said on Truth Social that her case was a hoax and a lie.
Carroll testified in the 2023 trial that she ran into Trump at the Fifth Avenue department store. She said they ended up in the lingerie department, where Trump forced her into a dressing room and shoved her against a wall. He then pulled down her tights and inserted his finger and then his penis into her vagina, she testified.