Trump asks US Supreme Court to overturn $5 mn judgment in Jean Carroll case

By Hadriana Lowenkron and Erik Larson

 

President Donald Trump asked the US Supreme Court to reverse a $5 million sexual abuse and defamation judgment against him in a civil lawsuit by former Elle magazine advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. 

Trump attorney Justin D. Smith on Monday filed a petition asking the court to consider the appeal, according to a copy of the document reviewed by Bloomberg News. The petition claims the trial was tainted by improper testimony by two other women who accused Trump of sexual abuse.

 

Trump was found liable by a Manhattan jury in May 2023 for sexually assaulting Carroll in the 1990s and then defaming her by calling her a liar, following a trial in which he declined to testify. But in a sworn deposition played for the jury, Trump denied any wrongdoing and claimed Carroll fabricated the claims. Carroll, who took the stand for three days, was awarded $5 million in damages. 

Carroll went public in 2019 with her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the 1990s. She sued in 2022 under a New York law that temporarily lifted the statute of limitations on assault claims that are decades old. 

 

Trump is also appealing a New York jury’s $83.3 million award levied against him in a different defamation suit Carroll filed against him, which focused on statements he made about her from the White House in 2019 denying her allegations.

 

Carroll’s lead attorney, Roberta Kaplan, declined to comment.

 

In Monday’s filing, Trump’s attorney told the justices that Carroll’s testimony was “implausible” and that the jury had improperly heard “equally implausible and biased testimony” from two other women, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff. Trump has denied sexually assaulting any of the three women.

 

Leeds testified that Trump assaulted her while they sat in the first-class section of a flight to New York in 1979. Stoynoff, a former People magazine journalist who covered Trump, testified that he sexually assaulted her at his Mar-a-Lago estate when she interviewed him for a 2006 story.

 

The federal appeals court in Manhattan rejected Trump’s challenges to their testimony, as well as the president’s argument that jurors shouldn’t have heard the so-called Access Hollywood tape. In the 2005 hot-mic recording, Trump can be heard making crude comments about famous men being allowed to grope women at will.

 

A majority of the federal appeals court judges in Manhattan voted in June against reconsidering that decision.

 

As is standard practice with new cases, Trump’s appeal wasn’t immediately available on the Supreme Court’s online docket.