By Andrew Chung and Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON, July 28 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out an $83.3 million jury verdict against him for defaming magazine writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019 when he denied her claim that he raped her during the 1990s in a Manhattan department store's dressing room.
Trump's lawyers filed an appeal on Tuesday seeking to overturn the verdict, urging the justices to review the case and find that lower courts wrongly decided that he had
forfeited invoking presidential immunity as a defense to shield him from Carroll's claims.
The Justice Department filed a separate appeal, contending that federal law allows the U.S. government to be substituted as the defendant in the case — an argument the lower courts had rejected.
The Republican president is challenging a decision by the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding the verdict.
"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. Yet, in upholding the exorbitant $83.3 million defamation judgment here, the 2nd Circuit never even decided whether presidential immunity applies to President Trump's allegedly defamatory statements," Trump's lawyers said in their filing.
The justices in a landmark 2024 decision ruled that former presidents have full immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office that were within their constitutional powers as president. The Carroll case is a civil lawsuit.
Trump's appeal comes a month after the justices declined to hear his bid to overturn a separate $5 million verdict that a jury ordered him to pay Carroll, finding that he had sexually abused and defamed her for statements he made while out of office, in 2022.
Trump has been battling Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine, ever since she published an excerpt from her memoir in 2019 in which she alleged that Trump had raped her around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.
Trump denied Carroll's claims and asserted that she lied about the accusations both in 2019 while he was still serving his first term as president, and again in 2022.
Trump's Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation targeting Carroll, as it has against several other adversaries of the Republican president. The investigation, disclosed in May, was focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in testimony tied to the two civil lawsuits that she won against Trump.
Carroll sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after he first denied her rape claim, telling a reporter that Carroll was "not my type," and asserted that she fabricated the accusations to sell her memoir. A jury sided with Carroll in 2024.
The case that led to the $5 million verdict concerned Trump's statements in 2022 when he called Carroll's claim a "hoax" and a "con job" in a post on social media. Jurors in that case decided in 2023 that Trump had sexually abused Carroll and defamed her, but did not find that Trump raped Carroll, as she had claimed.
The case that led to the $83.3 million verdict involved comments Trump made while still in office, raising complex questions about presidential immunity.
The 2nd Circuit last September rejected Trump's argument that the Supreme Court's 2024 ruling on presidential criminal immunity shields him from liability in Carroll's civil case. The court said Trump had failed to raise the immunity defense early on in the litigation, thus forfeiting it.
Trump's lawyers said the 2nd Circuit "engaged in procedural contortions to avoid addressing presidential immunity." They urged the Supreme Court to also decide that Trump has immunity in the case, calling the question "straightforward."
"Because accusations bearing on the president's fitness for office are unquestionably matters of public concern, presidential statements responding to press questions about such accusations are plainly official," the lawyers wrote.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung and Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham and Tom Hogue)
