A divided Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused Wednesday to rehear President Donald Trump's appeal of the $83.3 million defamation judgment won by writer E. Jean Carroll, exhausting his options at the appellate level and setting the stage for a direct petition to the Supreme Court. A majority of the full 12-judge panel denied Trump's motion for en banc review, as Fox News Digital reported.
The ruling marks the second time in seven months that an appeals court has turned back Trump's efforts to overturn a Carroll verdict. It leaves the nation's highest court as his last avenue of relief in a case his lawyers have called a fundamental question of presidential immunity.
Trump has repeatedly denied Carroll's claims, calling them "a complete con job." His legal team argues that the statements at the center of the lawsuit were made while he served as president and that the United States, not Trump personally, should have been substituted as the defendant. That argument will now travel to the Supreme Court, where the justices are already weighing whether to take up a separate, earlier Carroll verdict.
The litigation traces back to Carroll's 2019 book, in which the journalist and advice columnist claimed Trump raped her in 1996 in the dressing room of New York City's Bergdorf Goodman department store, located across the street from Trump Tower. Carroll sued Trump twice after the book's release.
In May 2023, a federal jury found Trump was not liable for rape but held him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, awarding Carroll $5 million in damages. A separate jury later returned the far larger $83 million defamation judgment that is now the subject of the appeals court's Wednesday decision.
Trump appealed the $5 million ruling to the Supreme Court in November 2025. The high court has not yet announced whether it will hear that case. If Trump now petitions the justices over the $83 million verdict as well, it would become the second Carroll matter before the Court, an unusual posture that could force the justices to address the underlying immunity question head-on.
The president has been no stranger to Supreme Court developments during his time in office, and this next move could prove among the most consequential for the legal boundaries of presidential speech.
The Second Circuit's denial was not unanimous, and the split revealed a sharp disagreement over how far presidential immunity should reach. Judge Denny Chin, writing for the majority, dismissed the notion that Trump should be allowed to raise the immunity defense so late in the proceedings.
Chin wrote, as Breitbart reported:
"If any other litigant had failed to raise an affirmative defense in this way, there would be no question as to whether he waived his right to assert it."
In a separate concurrence, Chin added that the court "appropriately declined to convene en banc to revisit this issue" and pointed to the trial record, noting that "Trump made multiple statements over many years accusing Carroll of lying for political and financial gain."
Dissenting judges saw the case very differently. Judge Steven Menashi argued that Trump's public comments fell squarely within the duties of the presidency.
Menashi wrote:
"Making public statements to the press is part of the president's job."
He went further in a lengthy dissent, as the Associated Press reported:
"Put together, these proceedings represent a manifest miscarriage of justice."
Dissenting judges also argued that the $83 million damages award was excessively large and that the United States should have been substituted as the defendant, the same arguments Trump is expected to press before the Supreme Court.
The defamation claims hinge on statements Trump made publicly after Carroll's accusations became national news. In an October 2022 post on Truth Social, Trump wrote: "I don't know this woman, have no idea who she is, other than it seems she got a picture of me many years ago, with her husband, shaking my hand on a reception line at a celebrity charity event." He also said Carroll was "not my type."
The jury that returned the $83 million verdict concluded those statements, and others like them, constituted defamation. Trump's attorneys have maintained that a sitting president responding to public accusations through the press is exercising an official function, not a personal one, and that the case should therefore be shielded by immunity doctrines.
The Supreme Court has been actively engaged with Trump-related appeals in recent terms, and the Carroll case would add yet another high-profile matter to a docket already thick with questions about executive authority.
If Trump petitions the justices, the case will present several distinct legal questions. First, whether a president who responds to sexual assault allegations in public is acting within the scope of his office. Second, whether the federal government should have been substituted as the defendant under the Westfall Act, a move that would have effectively ended Carroll's personal claim against Trump. And third, whether an $83 million damages award in a defamation case passes constitutional muster.
The dissenting judges on the Second Circuit signaled that at least some members of the federal judiciary believe the answer to all three questions favors Trump. That gives his legal team a roadmap, and a set of appellate opinions to cite, when they file their petition.
Trump himself has discussed the possibility of reshaping the Supreme Court's composition if Justices Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas retire. Fox News Digital noted that Trump spoke with Maria Bartiromo about the prospect of naming new justices, a development that takes on added weight as the Carroll case moves toward the Court's doorstep.
The Washington Examiner noted that Wednesday's ruling is the second recent appellate setback in the Carroll litigation, underscoring the procedural difficulty Trump has faced in lower courts. But the Supreme Court operates on a different plane, with broader discretion over which cases to accept and a demonstrated willingness to take up questions of presidential power.
The Court has handed Trump significant legal victories before, and his team will be counting on the justices to see the immunity question as one that transcends any single plaintiff or any single verdict.
At bottom, the Carroll case asks whether a president can be held personally liable, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, for publicly denying accusations made against him. If the answer is yes, every future president will face the same exposure every time a private citizen levels a charge and the president responds.
That is the argument Trump's lawyers will carry to the Supreme Court. Whether the justices take it up remains an open question. But the Second Circuit's split decision, with forceful dissents calling the proceedings "a manifest miscarriage of justice," suggests the legal debate is far from settled.
The lower courts have had their say. Now the only court that matters gets to decide whether it wants the last word, and whether $83 million is the price a president pays for saying "I don't know this woman."
