The Justice Department is looking to intervene on behalf of President Donald Trump in his appeal of the defamation verdict awarded to E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of sexually assaulting her in a New York department store dressing room.
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.
The department argued that the U.S. government should therefore be substituted as the defendant in the case, CBS News reported.
Trump was ordered to pay $83.3 million in damages by a federal jury in 2024 for defamatory comments he made denying Carroll’s allegations of sexual abuse. A separate federal jury in 2023 found him liable for sexual abuse against Carroll and instructed him to pay her $5 million, but he has denied all of the allegations and appealed both cases.
He made the allegedly defamatory statements in 2019, while he was in office during his first term as president. The DOJ, which is led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, claimed in the new filing that Trump was acting in his official capacity when he made the remarks.
James Pfander, a professor at Northwestern School of Law told CBS News that as “a legal issue ultimately for the courts, the [Justice Department’s] certification alone does not decide the question” of whether Trump’s remarks fall within the scope of the presidency.
In 2019, Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. He denied the allegations by claiming that he had never met the advice columnist, calling Carroll a “whack job” and accusing her of “totally lying.”
Kirsten Wilkinson, the director of the Justice Department’s Torts Branch Civil Division, wrote in an exhibit included with the case’s latest filing, “I find that Donald J. Trump was acting within the scope of his office or employment at the time of the incidents out of which the plaintiff’s claims arose.”
But Pfander argued that invoking the Westfall Act after a trial may come too late. The law, he said, was designed to shield federal employees before they face trial.
One of Trump’s attorneys argued last year that the case should be dismissed under the Supreme Court’s broad ruling on presidential immunity, which shields presidents from criminal prosecution for “official acts.”
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan, however, slammed that argument in a January brief: “If there were ever a case where immunity does not shield a president’s speech, this one is it.”
The post Trump’s Justice Department Steps In for Him on E. Jean Carroll Appeal appeared first on The Daily Beast.
