Trump Petitions Supreme Court to Toss $83.3 Million E. Jean Carroll Judgment

Donald Trump's attorneys filed a petition with the Supreme Court on Tuesday asking justices to throw out the $83.3 million defamation judgment won by writer E. Jean Carroll, according to Fox News, which reported it was first to obtain the filing. The New York Times also reported on the petition Tuesday, according to Newsmax's coverage of that reporting.

The core argument: presidential immunity. Trump's lawyers say the statements he made in 2019 denying Carroll's sexual assault allegations were made from the White House, in response to press questions, and count as official presidential communications under the Supreme Court's 2024 immunity ruling.

"This is the first case in our Nation's history in which a court has imposed damages liability on a President for his conduct in office," the filing states, according to Fox News. The petition argues the Second Circuit Court of Appeals never actually decided whether immunity applied, even after the Supreme Court found that "most of a President's public communications are likely to fall comfortably within" that protection.

Trump's team warns that letting the judgment stand will scare future presidents into silence for fear of personal financial liability over official statements. "It would seriously cripple the proper and effective administration of" government, the filing argues, quoting the Supreme Court's own language from the immunity case.

The 2024 immunity ruling was a major, contested precedent specifically because the justices wanted to protect the presidency as an institution from being weaponized through civil and criminal liability for official acts. If Trump's statements genuinely count as official acts, the legal question of whether the Second Circuit skipped a required step is worth raising.

But there's a real distinction the petition has to overcome. Carroll's underlying claim isn't about a policy decision or an official government act. It's about a president denying, in harsh personal terms, that he sexually assaulted a private citizen decades earlier. Courts up to now have treated that as personal conduct dressed in presidential clothing, not the exercise of executive power itself. The Second Circuit's three-judge panel already rejected a rehearing request in April, according to Fox News.

Two verdicts, one petition

This is Trump's second run at the Supreme Court over Carroll. The justices previously declined to review a separate $5 million judgment tied to a 2023 jury verdict, where Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, according to Newsmax. After that denial, a trial judge released the money, which had been held during appeals, to Carroll.

The new petition asks the Supreme Court to consider both judgments together. The $83.3 million award, handed down by a Manhattan jury in 2024, broke down as $65 million in punitive damages and $18.3 million in compensatory damages, according to Newsmax.

Carroll first publicly accused Trump of assaulting her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s. Trump has consistently denied the allegations and has called the legal actions against him politically motivated. Carroll's attorney did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment on the new filing.

Separate fight, same theme

Trump also weighed in Tuesday on an unrelated legal fight over tariffs, telling Fox News that his administration's newest tariffs are "doing the same thing" as the ones the Supreme Court struck down earlier this year for exceeding his statutory authority, according to CNBC. "It's a shame that I have to go a harder way for the tariffs because the Supreme Court, in a very close decision, ruled against me," Trump said. "Now, I have other ways of doing the same thing, but it's a more cumbersome way of doing it."

That admission is now being used against him. Sara Albrecht, chairman and CEO of the Liberty Justice Center, the nonprofit suing over the administration's newest tariffs, told CNBC that Trump's own words "bolster our argument" that the new duties are just a repackaged version of the tariffs the court already rejected. "Changing the statute doesn't change the law, and changing the stated rationale doesn't make an unlawful tariff lawful," Albrecht said.

The tariff comments aren't legally tied to the Carroll case, but they land the same week and reflect the same pattern. Trump is testing how far executive authority stretches, and courts are deciding where it snaps back. Whether the justices even agree to hear the Carroll petition is unresolved. The Supreme Court has discretion over which cases it takes, and it already passed once on a Carroll-related judgment. No timeline has been set for when the court will decide whether to grant review.