The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld an $83.3 million defamation verdict in favor of writer E. Jean Carroll on Monday, backing up a jury finding that President Donald Trump defamed her when he dismissed her 2019 sexual assault allegations as false.
The federal appeals panel rejected Trump’s bid to overturn the award, which includes $18.3 million in compensatory damages and $65 million in punitive damages.
The court deemed the jury’s decision “fair and reasonable” in light of Trump’s prolonged attacks on Carroll’s credibility and character, which the court noted had continued for at least five years and had become “more extreme and frequent as the trial approached.”
The three-judge panel wrote in its ruling, “The statements all shared common themes: Trump continued to assert that Carroll was lying about the 1996 sexual assault and that she was motivated to do so for personal, financial, and political reasons, and to imply that Carroll was too unattractive to be sexually assaulted.”
It further found that the damages award was reasonable “in light of the extraordinary and egregious facts.”
Carroll claimed that Trump sexually assaulted her in 1996 at a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman dressing room by pushing her against a wall, pulling down her tights, and forcing himself on her.
Trump had sought presidential immunity, citing a 2024 Supreme Court ruling that granted him substantial immunity from criminal prosecution.
The appeals court, however, unanimously ruled that such immunity does not apply in this civil defamation suit, and emphasized that Trump waived the immunity defense by failing to raise it earlier in the litigation.
This decision comes on the heels of a separate $5 million verdict upheld earlier this year that found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a related case stemming from similar statements made on social media in 2022.
On Monday, Trump’s legal team castigated Carroll for “weaponizing” the legal system for “political” reasons, calling her lawsuits “Carroll Hoaxes.”
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan stated that the Second Circuit had concluded “that E. Jean Carroll was telling the truth, and that President Donald Trump was not,” and that they “look forward to an end to the appellate process so that justice will finally be done.”
