CaliToday (12/11/2025): The former president's legal team argues the 2023 trial was "fatally unfair" due to prejudicial evidence, while a DOJ brief urges the high court to clarify the separate, critical question of immunity.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has officially petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, demanding it review and overturn the $5 million civil judgment finding him liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll.
The move escalates a legal war that has spanned nearly three decades from an alleged encounter in the mid-1990s to the highest court in the nation and opens a new, complex front regarding the scope of presidential immunity.
The petition, filed this week, argues that the 2023 trial was fundamentally tainted. It asserts that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan committed a critical error by allowing the jury to hear "prejudicial" and "improper" evidence.
This included:
The 2005 "Access Hollywood" Tape: The infamous recording in which Mr. Trump was caught on a hot mic making lewd, private comments about women.
Testimony from Other Accusers: The court allowed two other women to testify that Mr. Trump had sexually assaulted them in a similar fashion years ago.
Trump's lawyers argue this evidence was "fatally unfair," violating federal rules of evidence by creating an "overwhelming" bias against the former president, leading the jury to find him liable based on character rather than the specific, uncorroborated claims in the case.
The Decades-Long Dispute
E. Jean Carroll, a former columnist for Elle magazine, first alleged that Mr. Trump sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York in the mid-1990s.
When she went public with the claim in 2019, Mr. Trump, then president, vehemently denied it. He stated, "She's not my type," and called her story a "hoax and a lie" fabricated "to sell a new book."
In his appeal, Mr. Trump’s team emphasized that Carroll’s claim was "unsubstantiated," lacking "any witnesses, physical evidence, or a police report." They argue she only brought the "false accusation" more than 20 years later, after he became the 45th President, to inflict political damage and seek personal profit.
The Path to SCOTUS
This petition targets the first of two major verdicts Carroll won against Trump:
May 2023: A New York jury found Mr. Trump not liable for rape, but liable for sexual abuse and defamation, awarding Carroll $5 million in damages.
December 2024: The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this $5 million verdict.
June 2025: The 2nd Circuit declined to rehear the case en banc (with a full panel of judges), exhausting Trump's options at the appellate level.
This verdict is separate from a second, even larger judgment. In January 2024, a different jury ordered Mr. Trump to pay Carroll an additional $83.3 million for defamatory statements he made in 2022 while continuing to deny her claims. That verdict was subsequently upheld by a federal appeals court in September 2025, which called the damages "reasonable given the severity and willful" nature of the defamation.
The Presidential Immunity Twist
While the appeal of the $5M case focuses heavily on the trial's evidence, it is the question of presidential immunity central to the $83.3M case that may now be the most compelling hook for the Supreme Court.
The appeals court, in the $83.3M case, ruled that Mr. Trump had waived (given up) his right to claim presidential immunity (for statements made as president) because his lawyers had failed to raise it properly at an earlier stage.
In a significant development, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed an amicus (friend of the court) brief. The DOJ’s brief does not side with Trump but urges the Supreme Court to take the case specifically to clarify the legal question: Can a president's official-act immunity be "waived" at all?
This issue directly intersects with the Supreme Court's own recent, landmark ruling on criminal presidential immunity. Legal analysts suggest that while the evidentiary arguments are a long shot (trial judges have broad discretion), this technical question about the nature of immunity is exactly the kind of structural issue that might attract the attention of the court's conservative majority.
What's Next?
E. Jean Carroll’s legal team has not yet issued a formal response, but she has previously called the verdicts "a vindication" and "a victory for women who are assaulted."
The Supreme Court has not yet scheduled the case for conference, and there is no guarantee it will be heard. The court accepts only a tiny fraction (often less than 1%) of the thousands of petitions it receives each year.
However, if the justices do agree to take up the case, it could set a critical legal precedent on the boundaries between a president's official immunity and personal accountability in civil lawsuits.