Trump plans to ask Supreme Court to toss E. Jean Carroll’s $5 million
abuse and defamation verdict
[September 04, 2025]
By MICHAEL R. SISAK
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump will soon ask the Supreme Court
to throw out a jury’s finding in a civil lawsuit that he sexually abused
writer E. Jean Carroll at a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s
and later defamed her, his lawyers said in a recent court filing.
Trump’s lawyers previewed the move as they asked the high court to
extend its deadline for challenging the $5 million verdict from Sept. 10
to Nov. 11. The president “intends to seek review” of “significant
issues” arising from the trial and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals’ subsequent decisions upholding the verdict, his lawyers said.
Carroll's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said Wednesday: “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."
Carroll testified at a 2023 trial that Trump turned a friendly encounter
in spring 1996 into a violent attack in the dressing room at Bergdorf
Goodman, a luxury retailer across the street from Trump Tower. The jury
also found Trump liable for defaming Carroll when he made comments in
October 2022 denying her allegation.
A three-judge appellate panel upheld the verdict last December,
rejecting Trump’s claims that trial Judge Lewis A. Kaplan’s decisions
spoiled 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 all three women’s
allegations.
In June, 2nd Circuit judges denied Trump’s petition for the full
appellate court to take up the case. That left Trump with two options:
accept the result and allow Carroll to collect the judgment, which he'd
previously paid into escrow, or fight on in Supreme Court, whose
conservative majority — including three of his own appointees — could be
more open to considering his challenge.
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Trump skipped the 2023 trial but testified briefly at 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 resulted
from comments then-President Trump made in 2019 after Carroll first
made the accusations publicly in a memoir.
Judge Kaplan presided over both trials and instructed the second
jury to accept the first jury’s finding that Trump had sexually
abused Carroll. Judge Kaplan and Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan,
are not related.
In their deadline-related filing, Trump’s lawyers said Kaplan
compounded his “significant errors” at first trial by “improperly
preventing” Trump from contesting the first jury’s finding that he
had sexually abused Carroll, leading to an “unjust judgment of $83.3
million.”
The 2nd Circuit heard arguments in June in Trump’s appeal of that
verdict but has not ruled.
Trump has had recent success fending off costly civil judgments.
Last month, a New York appeals court threw out Trump’s staggering
penalty in a state civil fraud lawsuit.
The Associated Press does not identify people who say they have been
sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has
done.
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