Former President Donald Trump has failed in his latest attempt to overturn the massive $83.3 million jury verdict awarded to writer E. Jean Carroll.
On Monday, a federal appeals court in Manhattan rejected Trump’s arguments that he should have been immune from Carroll’s lawsuit because he was president at the time. The three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the jury’s decision was reasonable, given the seriousness of the case.
Carroll, now 81, has long accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. Trump denied it in 2019, dismissing her claims by saying she wasn’t his “type” and suggesting she made up the story to sell her book. Those comments, and later ones he repeated on social media, became the basis for two defamation trials.
Juries have now ruled against Trump twice: first in 2023, when he was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million for sexual abuse and defamation, and again in January 2024, when a jury awarded her $83.3 million — $18.3 million for reputational and emotional harm, plus $65 million in punitive damages.
Trump’s legal team argued that a 2024 Supreme Court decision granting him broad criminal immunity should also apply to this civil case. He also claimed his 2019 remarks were part of his duties as president, and that stripping him of immunity could weaken the presidency. The court didn’t buy it.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over both trials, was also accused by Trump of mishandling aspects of the case, including excluding his testimony about wanting to defend himself, his family, and the presidency. But the appeals court left Kaplan’s rulings intact.
Carroll, who has leaned into her fight with Trump publicly, even released a new memoir in June titled Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President, chronicling her legal battles with him.
For now, the $83 million verdict remains — though Trump is still expected to keep appealing. Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, Wikimedia commons.
