While the Supreme Court considers the Trump administration’s bids to halt food stamp funding and deploy troops in Chicago, the president’s personal lawyers are asking the justices to reverse one of the civil verdicts won by E. Jean Carroll, the writer he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming.
Carroll won two similar cases against Donald Trump: one in which she secured an $83.3 million defamation award that was recently upheld by an appeals court, and another in which she won $5 million for sexual abuse and defamation that has also been upheld on appeal thus far.
The latter case is further along in the appeals process and is the subject of the president’s Supreme Court petition. In it, his lawyers argue that the jury was only able to find him liable because of a series of improper evidentiary rulings that made his trial unfair.
How the justices handle the petition has implications for the larger monetary verdict, too, because both cases involve similar legal issues.
In the petition — which was dated Monday but hadn’t appeared on the court’s docket as of Tuesday afternoon — Trump’s lawyers argue that Carroll tried to “buttress her implausible story” that he sexually assaulted her decades earlier by improperly relying on testimony from other accusers as well as the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump talks about grabbing women by their genitals.
A federal appellate panel affirmed the $5 million verdict, reasoning that Trump hadn’t shown sufficient legal error to warrant a new trial. The full appeals court covering New York declined to rehear the case, over dissent from two Trump appointees who said the verdict was “based on impermissible character evidence and few reliable facts.” Trump’s lawyers highlight that dissent in seeking to persuade the justices to take the appeal. It takes four justices to agree to do so.
In theory, the high court doesn’t take cases just to fix lower court errors. So even if the justices agree that certain evidence shouldn’t have been used to find Trump liable, that alone wouldn’t typically warrant Supreme Court consideration.
That’s why his lawyers argue that those asserted errors raise a conflict among the federal appeals courts when it comes to handling evidence. As a general matter, lawyers spotlight alleged circuit splits to try to convince the justices they need to be resolved.
Trump’s lawyers urge the justices to take the case “to ensure uniformity among the Circuits and proper application of evidentiary rules that, if misapplied, will result in the erroneous introduction of outcome-determinative and highly prejudicial propensity evidence in both criminal and civil cases, as occurred here.” Carroll’s lawyers will have an opportunity to file a brief opposing review before the justices decide whether to take the case. They aren’t on a deadline to decide, and they reject most of the petitions they receive. The petition is just the latest personal litigation from the president to land on dockets around the country. In another recent one, he is appealing his New York state conviction for falsifying business records to cover up a hush money scheme in connection with the 2016 presidential race. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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