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Trump Argues That His Immunity Extends to E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuits

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Trump Argues That His Immunity Extends to E. Jean Carroll’s Lawsuits

President Trump and the writer E. Jean Carroll are arguing over whether a Supreme Court decision affording him substantial criminal immunity also shields him from having to pay tens of millions in damages for insulting her and saying she lied about his sexually assaulting her.

Mr. Trump made his arguments last year in his appeal of the $83.3 million verdict by a jury that found him liable for defaming Ms. Carroll in 2019 after she accused him of a decades-old attack. On Monday, Ms. Carroll pushed sharply back.

Her lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, argued in a brief that Mr. Trump’s view of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which protected him from charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, was too expansive. His statements calling Ms. Carroll’s accusation “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie,” were strictly personal, she wrote. She said they fell far outside the boundaries of the official acts that presidential immunity protects.

“If there were ever a case where immunity does not shield a president’s speech, this one is it,” Ms. Kaplan said in her brief.

The dispute over the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, which addressed the scope of a president’s immunity from prosecution, comes as Mr. Trump has seen criminal cases against him in two states come to an end, and a third delayed indefinitely. In a fourth case, in New York, after Mr. Trump was found guilty of 34 counts in a trial stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star, the judge imposed no jail time.

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But Ms. Carroll’s legal battle with Mr. Trump — fought in two lawsuits spanning more than half a decade and now based in the federal appeals court for the Second Circuit in Manhattan — continues to move forward.

“Presidential immunity forecloses any liability here and requires the complete dismissal of all claims,” Mr. Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, said in an appeals brief in September, citing the Supreme Court decision of last summer. (Mr. Trump has since chosen Mr. Sauer to serve in his administration as the U.S. solicitor general.)

Last month, the Second Circuit appeals court upheld a $5 million judgment against Mr. Trump in the other lawsuit that Ms. Carroll filed against him in Manhattan.

In that case, a federal jury in May 2023 found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing Ms. Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. It also found that he had defamed her when, in 2022, he said on Truth Social that her case was a hoax and a lie.

Ms. Carroll testified in the 2023 trial that she ran into Mr. Trump at the Fifth Avenue department store, and he asked for her help buying a present for a female friend. She said they ended up in the lingerie department, where Mr. Trump forced her into a dressing room and shoved her against a wall. He then pulled down her tights and inserted his finger and then his penis into her vagina, she testified.

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Ms. Carroll had accused Mr. Trump of rape. The jury of six men and three women found that she had been sexually abused by Mr. Trump, but did not find he had raped her. The jurors have never said why they selected the lesser offense of sexual abuse over rape, which under New York law at the time was defined as sexual intercourse without consent that involves penetration of the penis in the vaginal opening.

The trial judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of U.S. District Court, ruled that Mr. Trump had waived any immunity argument when he did not raise it early in the litigation.

The $83.3 million jury verdict against Mr. Trump came in Ms. Carroll’s second trial, held in January 2024. That case stemmed from comments Mr. Trump made in 2019, when he was still in office during his first term, after Ms. Carroll first accused him, in a New York magazine book excerpt, of raping her in the dressing room.

Mr. Trump called her allegation false and said he had never met Ms. Carroll and did not know who she was. He continued to attack her in social media posts and at news conferences.

Ms. Carroll kept the assault a secret for years, telling only two close friends, before she disclosed it in the magazine excerpt.

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Video: We Analyzed the Deadly Crash at LaGuardia

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Video: We Analyzed the Deadly Crash at LaGuardia

new video loaded: We Analyzed the Deadly Crash at LaGuardia

Our graphics reporter Lazaro Gamio breaks down the second-by-second analysis leading up to the deadly plane crash at LaGuardia Airport.

By Lazaro Gamio, Coleman Lowndes and James Surdam

March 27, 2026

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Video: LaGuardia Crash Survivors Recount Ordeal

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Video: LaGuardia Crash Survivors Recount Ordeal

“I just thought, please don’t let this be how my life ends. I’m not ready to die. When we landed, it was a very rough landing. Like we landed and the plane jolted back up, and that caught a lot of passengers off guard. Everyone kind of like, ‘What’s going on?’ And then you hear the pilot braking, and it was like just this grinding sound.” “Everybody was shocked everywhere. There was — there’s people screaming. The plane just veered off course. I mean, it was just — it all happened so quickly, but it all felt just like a very dire situation.” “Oh, God. Oh my goodness. That’s crazy.” “People were bleeding from their nose, cuts and scrapes. I saw black eyes, all different types of facial contusions, bruising and bleeding. I was sitting by the exit door, and I opened the exit door. There was a sense of camaraderie amongst the survivors. Nobody was pushing, shoving, ‘I got to get out first.’” “The plane actually tipped back as we were leaving, as people were getting off the plane. That was when the nose kind of fell off the front of the plane, and the whole plane kind of went up to what we’d seen in all the pictures of the plane’s nose in the air.” And there was no slide when we got out. A lot of us were jumping off of the airplane wing to get down. And when I got out and I saw that the front of the plane, how destroyed it was, I just was — I was in shock.” “It was only really when I was outside of the plane, looking back at the plane, and I had seen what had happened to the cockpit, and then just like this sense of dread overcame me, where I was just like, wow, a lot of people might have just been pretty badly hurt.” “I’m grateful to the pilots who were so courageous and brave, and acted swiftly, and they saved our lives. And if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be able to come home to my family. I’m forever indebted to them. They’re my heroes.”

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Video: Passenger Jet and Fire Truck Crash at LaGuardia Airport, Leaving 2 Dead

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Video: Passenger Jet and Fire Truck Crash at LaGuardia Airport, Leaving 2 Dead

new video loaded: Passenger Jet and Fire Truck Crash at LaGuardia Airport, Leaving 2 Dead

The two pilots of a Air Canada Express jet were killed after a collision with a Port Authority fire truck on Sunday at LaGuardia Airport in New York.

By Axel Boada and Monika Cvorak

March 23, 2026

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