OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
4:56 PM – Wednesday, May 4, 2026
President Donald Trump’s legal team filed a formal request with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday, seeking a temporary stay of a recent ruling that cleared the way for E. Jean Carroll to collect a massive $83.3 million defamation judgment.
The move is a strategic precursor to a planned appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS), where Trump’s attorneys reportedly intend to argue that presidential immunity should have shielded him from the former advice columnist’s long-running litigation.
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The latest filing follows a setback for Trump last week when the 2nd Circuit declined to re-hear his claims of immunity en banc. In a split decision, the appellate court rejected Trump’s efforts to substitute the United States as the defendant under the Westfall Act.
Trump’s defense team argued in Wednesday’s motion that failing to pause the proceedings would cause “irreparable harm,” forcing the president to endure the “burdens of proceedings to execute on the judgment” while significant constitutional questions remain unresolved.
The appeal to SCOTUS is expected to focus on whether absolute presidential immunity can be waived, a point of contention that has divided lower court judges. While a three-judge panel previously ruled that Trump waived this defense by waiting too long to raise it, a dissenting opinion from Judge Steven Menashi argued the majority’s stance was “erroneous” and represented a “manifest miscarriage of justice.”
Trump already has a separate petition pending before the Supreme Court regarding a $5 million verdict from a 2023 trial, where a New York jury found him liable for the sexual abuse of Carroll in a department store dressing room in the 1990s, despite Carroll providing absolutely no evidence and the jury agreeing with her word against his, as well as subsequent defamation.
That petition has been rescheduled multiple times for the justices’ private conferences and is currently set for consideration on May 14th.
Roberta Kaplan, the attorney representing E. Jean Carroll, indicated that her client does not oppose the stay but remains “eager for this case to be over so that she can finally obtain justice.”
The outcome of the Supreme Court’s involvement could have profound implications for the limits of executive protection in civil matters. While the High Court’s 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States established broad immunity in criminal cases, Trump’s attorneys are now pushing for those protections to be applied with equal force to civil defamation claims arising from statements made during his first term in office.
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