Trump asks Supreme Court to overturn verdict in E. Jean Carroll case

WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Nov 10 to overturn a US$5 million (S$6.52 million) civil judgment that he had sexually abused and defamed writer E. Jean Carroll.

In the petition, lawyers for Mr Trump claimed that the assertions against him were “implausible” and “unsubstantiated” and argued that the trial court had erred in a “series of indefensible evidentiary rulings”.

A copy of the petition, which had not yet appeared on the court’s public-facing docket, was reviewed by The New York Times. A spokesperson for Mr Trump’s legal team said the President would continue to fight the case and referred to it as “liberal lawfare”. Lawyers for Ms Carroll declined to comment.

Mr Trump’s lawyers had alerted the Supreme Court in late August that the President intended to ask the justices to review the case. He had been granted a filing extension with a deadline of Nov 10.

The appeal stems from a case that played out in a New York City courtroom before Mr Trump was reelected. A federal jury in May 2023 had found Mr Trump

liable for sexually abusing Ms Carroll

in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. The jury also concluded that Mr Trump had defamed her when, in 2022, he said on Truth Social that her case was a hoax and a lie.

The Supreme Court selects which cases to hear among the thousands of petitions filed each year. The timing varies by case, but it often takes several months from the filing of a petition for the court to make a decision on whether to hear a case.

In 2024, a panel of judges for the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals had upheld the jury’s verdict and US$5 million judgment against him. Mr Trump had argued, among other things, that a Lower Court in Manhattan had erred by allowing two women to testify in the Carroll trial that he had also sexually assaulted them.

In June, the appeals court rejected a request by Mr Trump’s lawyers that the full court review the case. NYTIMES