A Democrat-appointed three-judge panel of a federal appeals court at Manhattan denied President Trump’s request to throw out the defamation suit brought against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll and upheld the $83 million judgement.  

“We hold that the district court did not err in any of the challenged rulings and that the jury’s duly rendered damages awards were reasonable in light of the extraordinary and egregious facts of this case,” the unsigned, unanimous decision, published on Monday, concluded. 

The three judges on the panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit included Denny Chin, who was appointed by President Obama in 2010, and Sarah Merriam and Maria Kahn, who were appointed by President Biden in 2022 and 2023 respectively. 

Mr. Trump is expected to request a full panel to review the case. Should that not go his way, he can appeal to the conservative-majority Supreme Court.

Mr. Trump’s defense team had argued that in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity the case should either be thrown out completely or he should be granted a new trial. The attorneys also argued that the judgment is excessive. (Mr. Trump secured a bond worth nearly $92 million, as the Sun reported.) But the three judges wrote, “We are not persuaded.” 

“The record in this case supports the district court’s determination that the ‘degree of reprehensibility’ of Mr. Trump’s conduct was remarkably high, perhaps unprecedented,” the ruling stated. 

The decision is the latest in a years-long legal feud between Mr. Trump, 79, and Ms. Carroll, 81, a former sex and romance columnist at Elle magazine who accused him of raping her in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, a high-end Manhattan department store, sometime in the mid-1990s.

Two decades after the alleged incident occurred, Ms. Carroll sued Mr. Trump for defamation in 2019, after she published an excerpt from her then-upcoming book, “What Do We Need Men For?” in New York magazine and Mr. Trump then called her a liar. 

According to Ms. Carroll, she ran into Mr. Trump at the department store by coincidence and then went with him to the lingerie floor to help him pick out a gift. Once there, he allegedly shoved her into a dressing room and raped her.  

Mr. Trump has fiercely denied these claims. 

Shortly after the salacious story exploded in the press, Mr. Trump, then the sitting president, said he had never met “this woman in my life,” that she was not his “type,” and that “she is trying to sell a new book — that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.” 

After Mr. Trump’s response to the allegations, Ms. Carroll filed a defamation lawsuit. She said that effectively being called a liar by a sitting president ruined her credibility, severely damaged her career, and turned her life upside down. After her lawsuit, Carroll I, bounced around the courts for years, it was finally tried at the Southern District court at Manhattan in January 2024. Mr. Trump, who was in the midst of his presidential campaign, attended the trial on some days and even testified briefly.  

The jury held Mr. Trump liable for the defamation and found that he acted with malice, and because Mr. Trump’s comments about Ms. Carroll’s “false accusations” continued throughout the trial, Ms. Carroll’s attorneys asked the jury to impose an even higher judgment. 

While Ms. Carroll had originally asked for $10 million in total, defense attorney Roberta Kaplan suggested during her closing argument at least $24 million. She broke the damages down to reputational repair, for which she sought $12 million, and emotional distress, another $12 million, and then she left an open amount for punitive damages.

The jury awarded Ms. Carroll $11 million for reputational repair, to compensate her for the damage to her reputation, $7.3 million for emotional harm, and $65 million in punitive damages that was meant to punish Mr. Trump for his repeated behavior, which the jury viewed as malicious, and to deter him from making future comments, bringing the total judgment to $83.3 million. 

But there is more. 

Eager to be heard by the courts, Ms. Carroll had filed a second civil lawsuit in 2022, Carroll II, after New York state, in the wake of the #Metoo movement, passed the Adult Survivors Act, which temporarily lifted expired statutes of limitations for people who claimed they were victims of sexual assaults. Ms. Carroll sought damages for the decades-old rape accusation and for other defaming statements by Mr. Trump. That case was heard prior to Carroll I, in May 2023. The jury found the former president was not liable for rape, but found him liable for sexual assault and for defamation and awarded Ms. Carroll $5 million. 

The same 2nd Circuit appeals court also upheld that verdict after Mr. Trump tried to appeal it in December 2024, also by a three-panel judge decision. Mr. Trump’s request for a full-panel review of the case was denied in June, as the Sun reported. As of now, Mr. Trump has not taken the case to the Supreme Court, but his legal team has mentioned that they plan to do so.   

In a statement published by Mr. Trump’s defense team on Monday, the president called for “an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system.”

The statement did not specify whether Mr. Trump would also seek a full-panel review by the court for the Carroll I  case. 

A full-panel review would include all 13 active judges and could also include senior, or semi-retired, judges, who have the discretion to decide whether to participate in such a review. 

Of the active 13 judges, five were nominated by President Trump, five by President Biden, two by President Obama, and one by President George W. Bush, giving the Republicans only a slight minority.    

Among the 14 senior judges are six Republican appointees, including one 93-year-old judge appointed by President Nixon, and eight Democratic appointees, including three judges appointed by President Carter.  

It’s unclear if the court would accept the request for a full-panel review, and what judges would be on that panel, if it does. 

As for Ms. Carroll, her attorney said in a statement that “we look forward to an end to the appellate process so that justice will finally be done.”

As of now, Mr. Trump has not paid any damages to Ms. Carroll. The president, who’s been a wily combatant in civil lawsuits for more than 50 years, is expected to go to any measure within his copious arsenal to prevent the plaintiff from receiving a cent.  

In the statement his defense attorney also said, “President Trump will keep winning against Liberal Lawfare, as he is focusing on his mission to Make America Great Again.”