An appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Justice Department may be able to shield former President Donald Trump from a 2019 defamation lawsuit filed by author E. Jean Carroll.
The court ruled Tuesday that as a federal government employee, the president is protected from certain lawsuits. Trump’s lawyers had been joined by Justice Department lawyers in arguing that the president is shielded from certain lawsuits by the Westfall Act, which shields federal employees from work-related lawsuits.
The author sued in 2019, when Trump was still president and after he accused her of ‘totally lying’ when she said he sexually assaulted her at an upscale New York department store in the 1990s. In October 2021, a federal judge in New York ruled that Trump was not immune from Carroll’s lawsuit.
“We reverse the district court’s decision that the President of the United States is not a government employee under Westfall law,” the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote on Tuesday.
However, the court left open the question of whether Trump’s comments about Carroll were made in his capacity as president or should be considered separate from his job as president.
The Second Circuit wrote that it would defer to DC’s highest court – the DC Court of Appeals – to decide the question: “Were the allegedly defamatory public statements made…in the course of his employment as President of the United States?
A lawyer for Trump did not immediately return a request for comment.
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Roberta Kaplan, an attorney for Carroll, pointed to Judge Denny Chin’s dissenting opinion in the case, in which he wrote that Trump was not acting within the scope of his duties when he said things like “she not my type” about Carroll.
“We are confident that the DC Court of Appeals, where this case is currently headed for certification, will agree,” Kaplan said in a statement to CBS News. She added that Carroll plans to file sexual battery lawsuit in New York under the state’s new adult survivors law, which goes into effect Nov. 24.
A Justice Department attorney argued in December that although “the former president made rude and offensive comments in response to the very serious sexual assault charges,” the law protecting employees like the president of a such trial had to be respected.
At that same hearing in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Trump attorney Alina Habba said Carroll should be considered a “public figure” and therefore held to a high bar for defamation claims.
Joshua Matz, an attorney for Carroll, claimed that Trump had “private and personal reasons” for allegedly defaming Carroll. Matz argued that “a job in the White House is not the promise of an unlimited prerogative to brutalize victims of past wrongdoings.”
