President Donald Trump is asking the US Supreme Court to review the $5m (£3.6m) civil case which found he defamed and sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll.
He repeatedly claimed that the judge who oversaw the civil trial, Lewis Kaplan, inappropriately allowed evidence to be presented that was detrimental to how the jury viewed Trump.
A federal appeals court agreed with the jury’s verdict last year and said Kaplan did not make errors that would warrant a new trial.
A New York jury awarded Ms. Carroll damages for her civil claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, then called the incident a social media hoax. He denied the allegations.
The Supreme Court is now Trump’s last hope to overturn the unanimous jury verdict. It is unclear whether the highest US court will take up the case.
A federal appeals court declined to rehear Trump’s challenge in June.
Trump’s comments about the jury’s findings in the case led a separate jury to order him to pay Ms. Carroll $83 million for defaming her. A panel of federal judges rejected his appeal of that decision in September, and Trump has now taken the next step in trying to have it overturned by asking the full bench of a federal appeals court to review the case.
In the petition filed with the Supreme Court, Trump’s lawyers argued that Kaplan should not have let jurors see the 2005 Access Hollywood tape that showed the president saying he groped and kissed women.
“There were no eyewitnesses, no video evidence and no police reports or investigations,” they wrote of Ms. Carroll’s allegations.
“Instead, Carroll waited more than 20 years to falsely accuse Donald Trump, whom she politically opposes, until after he became the 45th president, when she was able to maximize the political harm and profit from it.”
Roberta Kaplan, Ms Carroll’s lawyer, told the BBC she had no comment on the Supreme Court appeal.
While Trump was found to have defamed and sexually abused Ms. Carroll, the jury rejected her claim of rape as defined in the New York penal code.
Ms. Carroll, a former magazine columnist now 81, sued Trump for assaulting her in the mid-1990s in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store. The defamation stems from Trump’s post on his Truth Social platform in 2022 denying his claims.
Trump said Ms. Carroll was “not my type” and that she had lied.
