Left inset: Journalist E. Jean Carroll departs from the courthouse after the conclusion of the damages trial against Donald Trump at Manhattan Federal Court on January 26, 2024, in New York City (John Angelillo, Alamy Live News via AP). Main: Trump leaves his apartment building on Jan 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura).
In yet another defeat in court for President Donald Trump in his bid to overturn the $83 million defamation verdict a jury awarded to longtime advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decided Monday that the punishment was not excessive and there were no grounds to reconsider presidential immunity.
The per curiam ruling from a three-judge panel stated flatly that Trump”s latest attempt to use the U.S. Supreme Court’s immunity decision to his benefit was unavailing, putting the president on a losing streak in the 2nd Circuit.
“The present appeal is from the judgment in Carroll I. Although a panel of this Court has already rejected Trump’s claim of presidential immunity, Trump now argues that the Supreme Court’s intervening decision in Trump v. United States, warrants reconsideration of our prior decision,” the judges began. “He also challenges the district court’s grant of partial summary judgment in favor of Carroll, its striking a portion of his testimony, its jury instructions on punitive damages, and the size of the jury’s compensatory and punitive awards.”
“[W]e conclude that Trump has failed to identify any grounds that would warrant reconsidering our prior holding on presidential immunity. We also conclude that the district court did not err in any of the challenged rulings and that the jury’s damages awards are fair and reasonable,” the opinion added. “Accordingly, we AFFIRM the judgment of the district court.”
The Carroll I defamation case at issue — separate from Carroll II, the 2023 $5 million civil jury verdict that found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll — ended in 2024. The panel noted that the jury found Trump made defamatory statements in 2019 with “common law malice,” statements that were substantially similar to the ones he was found liable for in Carroll II.
During oral arguments on June 24, Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin, a Barack Obama appointee, and U.S. Circuit Judges Sarah Merriam and Maria Araújo Kahn, both Joe Biden appointees, looked on as Trump’s attorney Justin Smith insisted that the Carroll verdict was a “miscarriage of justice” that “severely damages the presidency,” claiming that the trial judge, Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, issued rulings that “prevented” Trump from “putting on critical evidence,” and asserted that Trump never actually waived his immunity defense.
Chin noted at the outset that the 2nd Circuit already held years ago that Trump’s immunity defense was waived because he didn’t raise it when answering Carroll’s then-lawsuit in state court, but Smith countered that SCOTUS’ intervening immunity decision in Trump v. United States — which granted wide immunity to presidents — was grounds for reconsidering that issue.
The panel also pointed out, however, that the issue of waiver wasn’t addressed in SCOTUS’ decision — and in retrospect, these remarks from the judges were a tip of the hand.
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“On interlocutory appeal in 2023, we held, as a matter of first impression, that presidential immunity is waivable, and that Trump waived his immunity by failing to raise it in his answer to the state court complaint. Despite our prior ruling, Trump renews his argument that presidential immunity cannot be waived. He also argues, for the first time, that even if presidential immunity is waivable, any such waiver requires an ‘explicit and unequivocal renunciation,'” the court said Monday. “We hold that both arguments are foreclosed under the law of the case doctrine and reject Trump’s challenge on this ground.”
A few lines later, the 2nd Circuit stated it was “not persuaded” by Trump’s claims of a “manifest injustice.”
“Trump contends that the law of the case does not apply. He submits that Trump represents a sufficient intervening change of law and that enforcing our prior decision on immunity would work a manifest injustice in light of that change,” the opinion said. “We are not persuaded.”
The panel also rejected the argument that the hefty punitive damages award, which ratcheted up the total Carroll award to $83 million, was excessive. The judges stated it was “now indisputable, based on the jury’s findings, Carroll did not lie and that Trump uttered falsehoods in his statements accusing her of lying and acting with improper motivations,” noting that defamatory statements Trump made in 2022 about Carroll “mirrored” or were “materially identical” to the ones he made in 2019, the statements at issue in Carroll I.
On June 21 and 22 in 2019, Trump reacted to Carroll’s sexual assault claims by saying he was falsely accused like Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, that he’d never met Carroll — although there is a photo of Carroll, her then-husband John Johnson, Trump, and Ivana Trump meeting in the late 1980s — and suggested that Carroll was either paid to “make up false stories of assault” or was doing so to sell her book.
The panel said a “reasonable juror could only conclude that Trump knew that his statements — that Carroll lied about him sexually assaulting her for ulterior purposes — were false,” and that the broader context shows Trump’s complaints about the damages award rang hollow.
“In sum, as observed by the district court, the conduct here supports a significant punitive damages award — it involved malice and deceit, caused severe emotional injury, and continued over at least a five-year period,” the panel said.
Calling two defamation cases “a useful point of reference” as to whopping punitive damages amounts that “other courts have found acceptable,” the panel pointed to the Connecticut lawsuit of Sandy Hook parents against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and a suit against Peter Nygard, a convicted and incarcerated sexual predator dubbed “Canada’s Jeffrey Epstein.”
“More recently, in 2024, the Connecticut Court of Appeals upheld an award of $321,650,000 in common law punitive damages in the form of attorneys’ fees to 11 plaintiffs against Alex Jones who had falsely stated that the Sandy Hook shooting was a staged event,” the court said. “Likewise, a New York state trial court awarded Louis Bacon $100 million in punitive damages against fashion mogul Peter Nygard for defamation.”
Like those cases, the panel indicated, the “egregious facts” of the case against Trump made the damages awards “reasonable.”
“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 court concluded.
