Second Circuit upholds $83.3M defamation verdict against Trump

A federal appeals court on Monday upheld an 83.3 million defamation judgment against President Donald Trump, rejecting his argument that presidential immunity and other legal errors required a new trial, while Trump separately signaled he will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review a related 5 million judgment from a 2023 trial. The decisions keep in place two costly civil rulings from writer E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s and has sued him for years over his denials.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan unanimously rejected Trump’s appeal of the larger award, which stemmed from comments he made in 2019 denying Carroll’s accusation and attacking her on social media. The panel, composed of two Biden appointees and one Obama appointee, wrote that Trump “failed to identify any grounds” for overturning the verdict and concluded the district court did not err in rulings challenged on appeal. The judges found the jury’s punitive damages did not exceed reasonableness given what the panel described as the “extraordinary and egregious facts” of the case.