President Donald Trump is asking the US Supreme Court to review a $5m (£3.6m) civil case that found he defamed and sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll.
He has repeatedly argued that Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw the civil trial, improperly allowed evidence to be introduced that damaged the jury's view of Trump.
Last year, a federal appeals court agreed with the jury's verdict and said Kaplan did not commit errors that would warrant a new trial.
A New York jury awarded Carroll damages in her civil suit that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, then called the incident a social media hoax. He denied the accusations.
The Supreme Court is now Trump's last hope to overturn the unanimous jury verdict. It is unclear whether the US highest court will hear the case.
In June, a federal appeals court declined to rehear Trump's complaint.
Trump's comments about the jury's findings in the case led to a separate jury ordering 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 an attempt to have it overturned, asking the full panel of federal appeals court judges to reconsider the case.
In a petition filed with the Supreme Court, Trump's lawyers argued that Caplan should not have allowed jurors to watch the 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which the president says he fondled and kissed women.
“There were no eyewitnesses, no video evidence, no police report or investigation,” they wrote of Ms. Carroll’s allegations.
“Instead, Carroll waited more than 20 years to falsely implicate Donald Trump, whom she politically opposes, until he became the 45th president, when she could maximize political damage to him and gain for herself.”
Roberta Kaplan, Ms Carroll's lawyer, told the BBC she had no comment on the Supreme Court appeal.
Although Trump was found to have defamed Ms. Carroll and sexually assaulted her, the jury rejected her claim of rape as defined in New York's criminal code.
Ms. Carroll, a former magazine columnist who is now 81, sued Mr. Trump for attacking her in the mid-1990s in a Manhattan department store dressing room. The slander stemmed from a 2022 post by Trump on his Truth Social platform in which he refuted her claim.
Mr Trump said Ms Carroll was “not my type” and that she had lied.
