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.
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.
Michael R. Sisak, The Associated Press
