AP News72%
Trump and DOJ ask Supreme Court to toss $83 million defamation verdict in E. Jean Carroll case 5%
By LINDSAY WHITEHURST4% LARRY NEUMEISTER34%
7/29/2026, 7:49:04 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 8 faulty reasoning types, including Loss Aversion, Negativity Bias, and Biased Writer Voice, with Unattributed Quote as the most egregious example at 15.8% saturation with 66 hits. Analysis detected 230 faulty-reasoning hits from 417 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 12.2% and a BS Rank of 5% (28,526 of 29,795 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 95.70% of the article peer group.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and the Justice Department are asking the Supreme Court to toss an $83 million defamation verdict won by writer E.
Jean Carroll after she accused him of sexual assault, saying he can’t be sued for comments he made while he was president.
It’s the second time Trump has asked the justices to nix damages awarded by a jury to Carroll, a longtime advice columnist and former TV talk show host.
The Supreme Court refused in June to hear his appeal of another verdict, for $5 million, that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
The latest case centers on comments Trump made during his first term as president.
The Justice Department wants to invoke the Westfall Act, which shields government employees from being sued for doing their jobs.
“Absent this Court’s intervention, the sitting President is facing nearly a hundred million dollars of personal liability for conduct that was well within the scope of his federal office,” federal attorneys wrote.
“That alone deserves this Court’s attention.”
The documents were reviewed Wednesday by The Associated Press and expected to be formally docketed with the court shortly.
Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, argued that an appeals court “engaged in procedural contortions” to avoid addressing Trump’s claims that presidential immunity protects him from the $83 million award because he made the statements in question in 2019 while he was president.
“This is the first case in our nation’s history in which a court has imposed damages liability on a president for his conduct in office,” the lawyers wrote.
Carroll’s lawyers have declined to comment on the latest Trump filing.
Trump has long argued he cannot be sued over comments he made about Carroll during his first term where he disavowed knowing her and attacked her motivations for going public with her story in a recent memoir.
He’s also asking the Supreme Court justices to reconsider their rejection of his appeal in the $5 million verdict.
In 2023, another jury said Carroll was entitled to $5 million after concluding that Trump had subjected her to sexual abuse in the department store encounter and for defamation for remarks he had made after his first term ended.
That judgment has been paid.
The Associated Press does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Carroll has done.
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Neumeister reported from New York.
Speakers
2speakers7.4%attributed speech386writer words
Selected voice
0%flagged-word coverageJustice Department
20 attributed words65% of attributed speech17% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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