Trump and the Justice Department Asked the Supreme Court to Erase the $83.3 Million He Owes E. Jean Carroll for Defaming Her — Arguing That Calling His Sexual-Abuse Accuser a Liar Was an "Official Act" of the Presidency He Can't Be Sued For, and Putting Government Lawyers on His Personal Defense

In 2023, a jury found that Donald Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll and then defamed her. In 2024, a second jury ordered him to pay her $83.3 million for a separate round of defamation — the statements he made in 2019, from the White House, calling her a liar and denying he had ever touched her. He has spent every year since trying not to pay. On July 28, 2026, that effort reached the Supreme Court, and it arrived wearing the Justice Department's colors and a remarkable legal theory.

The theory: defaming her was "official"

Trump's petition asks the Court to erase the $83.3 million judgment on the ground of presidential immunity. The logic runs through the Court's own 2024 decision in Trump v. United States, which held that presidents are immune from liability for their official acts — and swept in, as dicta, that "most of a President's public communications" count as official acts.

So the argument is this: when Trump, as president in 2019, told reporters that Carroll was lying about the assault — that she was "not my type," that she made it up to sell a book — he was performing an official act of the presidency. And a president, the petition says, cannot be held personally liable for his official communications. Therefore the defamation verdict must fall.

Read plainly, Trump is asking the Supreme Court to rule that defaming his own sexual-assault accuser is part of the job of being president — and that the office immunizes him for it.

What the lower courts already said

This is not a novel question the courts have been waiting to resolve. A federal appeals court panel had already affirmed the $83.3 million award, calling it "reasonable in light of the extraordinary and egregious facts," and rejected Trump's legal challenges — including the immunity claim, which it found he had waived by failing to raise it in time. Trump lost, comprehensively, and is now asking the Supreme Court to give him on a third try what two juries and an appeals court refused.

The Justice Department on his personal defense

The more corrosive detail is who filed alongside him. The Justice Department — government attorneys paid by the public — asked the Supreme Court to toss the verdict too, arguing that Trump "can't be sued for comments he made while he was president." This continues a years-long effort to have the United States government substitute itself as the defendant in Carroll's defamation case, on the theory that Trump was acting within the scope of his office when he attacked her — which, if it succeeded, would mean the case gets dismissed entirely, because you cannot sue the federal government for defamation.

Sit with what that means. The Department of Justice — the institution meant to represent the United States, not the personal interests of the man who runs it — is spending public resources to try to make taxpayers, in effect, absorb the president's liability for defaming a woman he was found to have sexually abused. Carroll's case is not a matter of state. It is Donald Trump's private conduct toward a private citizen. The DOJ is treating it as government business because the president is the government's client now.

Why it's here

The petition is a test of how far the 2024 immunity ruling can be stretched. That decision was already a landmark expansion of presidential power — shielding official acts from prosecution. Trump is now probing whether it also shields civil defamation, whether "official communications" can be read to cover a president trashing his accuser, and whether the whole thing can be used to wipe out an $83.3 million debt he simply does not want to pay.

If the Court takes it and agrees, the implications run past Carroll. It would mean a president can defame anyone — an accuser, a critic, a private citizen — from the podium, with the full reach and credibility of the office, and face no civil consequence, because the podium makes it "official." The presidency would become not just a shield for governing, but a license to destroy reputations without liability.

The through-line of this administration is the conversion of public power into personal protection: the Justice Department defending the president's private conduct, the immunity doctrine expanded to cover his insults, the Treasury eyed to pay his debts and his rioters. The Carroll appeal is that instinct in its most naked form — a man found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, asking the highest court in the land to rule that smearing the victim was presidential, and enlisting the government's own lawyers to help him not pay her.