U.S. President Donald Trump looks on on the day he signs executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 17, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
The Department of Justice is filing to intervene on behalf of President Donald Trump in his appeal of the $83 million civil defamation judgment against him won by writer E. Jean Carroll, The Daily Beast reported on Friday.
"In a joint motion filed last week with Trump’s legal team, the Justice Department said the federal Westfall Act, which provides immunity to government employees for actions taken within the scope of their duties, should apply to Trump," reported Erkki Forster. "The department argued that the U.S. government should therefore be substituted as the defendant in the case, CBS News reported."
The basis of the DOJ intervention is that some of the defamatory statements Trump made came in 2019, when he was also a sitting president, and thus, according to the argument, immunity should apply to him for the statements.
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Carroll alleged that the president raped her in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan sometime in the late 1990s, although she doesn't recall the exact year. Trump has repeatedly claimed he doesn't know Carroll and that she fabricated the attack to advance her career, which was the basis of Carroll's defamation suit.
Juries in New York have found Trump liable for sexual abuse, though stopped short of rape due to definitions under New York law, as well as defamation for his denials of the incident.
The president has since fought this judgment on appeal, and additionally filed a lawsuit against ABC News and its anchor George Stephanopoulos for saying Trump had been adjudicated liable for rape — a matter which the network controversially settled out of court despite experts broadly considering the case frivolous.
The Carroll lawsuit is separate from the other massive civil judgment against Trump, secured in a fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully argued Trump had spent years keeping two sets of books and giving lower property valuations to tax agencies than banks and insurers. That case is also under appeal.