Court Rejects Trump’s Appeal of Carroll’s $83.3M Defamation Award Over Sexual Assault

The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected President Donald Trump’s appeal of a $83.3 million award that a federal civil jury found he must pay to former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll for repeated defamatory remarks Trump made about Carroll after she accused him of sexually assaulting her years ago.

“Given the unique and egregious facts of this case, we conclude that the punitive damages award did not exceed the bounds of reasonableness,” the panel of three judges wrote in upholding the award. The court noted that Trump’s conduct supports a “significant punitive damages award” as it “involved malice and deceit, caused severe emotional injury, and continued over at least a five-year period.”

In 2019, Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York in1996.

Trump responded — both when he was President of and again after he left office — by publicly accusing Carroll of a “hoax” and of fabricating her allegations for personal and political motives.

Carroll sued Trump initially for defamation based on statements he made during his first term as President. Later, Carroll sued Trump for the alleged 1996 sexual assault and for defamation based on statements he made after his first term as President ended.

The second case was tried first and the jury found that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll and that he defamed her in statements he made after he left office. The jury awarded Carroll compensatory and punitive damages totaling $5 million. An appeals court later affirmed that award.

After that jury’s verdict, a federal district court granted partial summary judgment in the first defamation suit in favor of Carroll on the issue of liability. A jury thereafter awarded Carroll $83.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages for defamatory statements Trump made while he was still in office.

This new Second Circuit opinion concerns Trump’s appeal of the $83.3 million judgment only.

In addition to arguing that the $83.3 million was “excessive,” Trump claimed that he was entitled to presidential immunity or, in the alternative, a new trial. But the panel rejected those arguments.

A panel of this same appeals court in 2023 rejected Trump’s claim of presidential immunity on grounds he had waved it by not raising it earlier in state court. However, Trump maintained that the landmark 2024 Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States that expanded presidential immunity warranted reconsideration of that prior decision. Trump argued that presidential immunity cannot be waived and that even if presidential immunity is waivable, such a waiver requires an “explicit and unequivocal renunciation.”

The Second Circuit panel rejected Trump’s arguments, holding that both arguments are foreclosed under the law of the case doctrine which “ordinarily forecloses relitigation of issues expressly or impliedly decided by the appellate court.”