Trump Petitions Supreme Court on $5M Carroll Judgment

Former President Donald Trump has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a $5 million civil judgment against him for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s. The filing, submitted on Monday by Trump's legal team, challenges rulings from lower courts that upheld a Manhattan jury's verdict from May 2023.

Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine and TV talk show host, accused Trump of assaulting her in a dressing room at the luxury Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan during spring 1996. She described the encounter as beginning as a chance meeting before turning violent. Carroll first went public with the allegation in 2019, detailing it in her memoir. She filed the lawsuit in 2022, invoking a New York state law that temporarily suspended the statute of limitations for older sexual assault claims.

At the trial, which Trump did not attend, a jury found him liable for the abuse and for defaming Carroll through statements he made in October 2022, when he denied her claims and called her account fabricated. Carroll testified for three days, while a video of Trump's deposition was played for the jury, in which he rejected the...