Donald Trump speaks to press after attending a hearing in the E. Jean Carroll case.Michael M. Santiago/Getty
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President Donald Trump’s legal team submitted false information to the Supreme Court in his ongoing legal battle against author E. Jean Carroll—who he was found liable for sexually assaulting in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996—according to documents reviewed by Mother Jones.
Justin D. Smith, Trump’s lawyer in the case, misrepresented the plot of an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in a November 2025 petition to the court. Trump, along with some of his supporters, has for years claimed that Carroll’s account of him raping and sexually assaulting her was copied from the 2012 SVU episode.
Friends of Carroll confirm she told them about Trump’s assault years before the episode was filmed.
Trump is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a $5 million judgment from 2023, when a federal jury held that he sexually abused Carroll and then defamed her. (A separate $83.3 million defamation judgement against him from 2024 is not directly at issue, but could be in the future if the Court sides with Trump.) The justices’ are scheduled to review Trump’s petition on February 20.
In the Supreme Court petition, Smith describes the episode as featuring “a business mogul” who “fantasizes about raping a victim in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.” He writes that the “plotline is virtually identical to the false allegations that Carroll launched against President Trump.”
In the episode from season 13, entitled “Theatre Tricks,” there is a small plotline about a sexual encounter in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. But the man involved is a prominent New York City judge, not, as Smith claimed, a “business mogul.” And what happened in the dressing room, which is discussed but not shown in the episode, was pre-planned and by all accounts consented to. A person with knowledge of how the SVU episode came together told CNN in 2019 that there’s “no correlation—none whatsoever” between “Theatre Tricks” and Carroll’s allegations against Trump. Carroll has repeatedly denied she made up her allegation based on the episode. At least two friends of Carroll have confirmed the author told them about the assault shortly after it took place and years before the episode was filmed or broadcast.
Smith did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on the false information included in the petition. Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer in the case, also did not respond to a request for comment.
The Rules of the Supreme Court say that petitioners must present information with “accuracy, brevity, and clarity.” Failure to do so, per Rule 14.4, “is sufficient reason for the Court to deny a petition.” It is unclear if Trump’s lawyer knowingly included inaccurate information or failed to confirm the details of the episode in question.
Carroll leaves a New York City court following the 2024 conclusion of her civil defamation trial against Trump.Michael M. Santiago/GETTY
The plot of “Theatre Tricks” involves a struggling young actress who seeks out sex work on a sugar daddy website, where she meets a judge who she helps fulfill a “stranger rape fantasy” that involves invading a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room while a woman tries on lingerie. It is one of over 550 SVU episodes spread across more than two dozen seasons containing hundreds of different examples of sexual violence—from harassment all the way to murder. The dressing room meet-up with the judge is mentioned for less than one minute in “Theatre Tricks,” which centers on a separate, nonconsensual sexual assault experienced by another character.
Carroll’s first public account of what happened with Trump in that dressing room around three decades ago came in a 2019 New York magazine article, excerpting her upcoming book. She detailed running into Trump when he asked her to advise him on a gift for, as she quoted him, “a girl.” They went around the store before he led them to the lingerie section, she wrote.
What unfolded next, as Carroll has since described many times, was Trump leading her into the dressing room, lunging at her, pushing her against the wall, pulling down her tights, using his fingers on her sexually, and penetrating her with his penis. Carroll wrote that she was eventually able to push him off and run out.
Carroll later sued Trump in 2022 for sexual battery and for defaming her by denying it through New York’s Adult Survivors Act. While Carroll has maintained that Trump used his fingers and penis in the assault, the jury, which ultimately awarded her $5 million, stopped short of finding Trump liable for rape under penile penetration. They found that Trump had “forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” according to District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the case.
The legal definition for rape differs by state and, at the time, New York’s law required penile penetration. (In January 2024, New York broadened its rape law to include other kinds of nonconsensual anal, oral, and vaginal sexual contact.) Despite that, Judge Kaplan wrote in 2023 that the jury’s decision “does not mean” that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Trump has consistently denied the claims, saying over the years that Carroll is a “nut job,” “mentally sick,” and “not my type.” He has posted on social media more than 100 times about her accusations.
Smith’s faulty description of the SVU episode was detailed by David Boyle, a California lawyer with a habit of filing amicus briefs on major Supreme Court cases. In his early January submission in support of Carroll, Boyle writes of “Trump’s disrespect for rape victims,” and calls out how the president’s filling “makes up a television-show character, or at least the character’s profession, to discredit Carroll.”
Why did Boyle write the brief? “It’s a famous case, and I don’t like rapists,” he says, “even if it’s quote-unquote ‘just’ a digital rapist,” dryly noting Judge Kaplan’s holding about penetration.
“This is the Supreme Court. People are supposed to be on good behavior, their best behavior, and do things in good faith,” Boyle says. “He’s the president. We’re paying him a salary to be president. He’s supposed to be—laugh as you will, knowing who he is—a role model.”
Boyle’s amicus brief was one of five submitted to the court. The other four are in support of Donald Trump and his argument that certain evidence used in the previous trial was inadmissible. Those briefs do not mention the SVU episode.
In this 2023 courtroom sketch, Trump defense attorney Joe Tacopina presents closing arguments as Carroll watches.Elizabeth Williams/AP
Trump, members of his legal teams, and some of his supporters have called on the SVU episode for years while attempting to discredit Carroll.
Within days of Carroll’s account originally being published in New York, a short clip from “Theatre Tricks” started circulating online. “Looks like that lunatic E. Jean Caroll got the idea about getting ‘raped’ by Trump in a dressing room at Burgdorfs while trying on lingerie from an episode of Law and Order SVU,” Mark Dice, a right-wing commentator with nearly 2 million YouTube subscribers, asserted. David J. Harris Jr, now host of The Pulse on Newsmax, wrote a post entitled, “Proof That Trump Accuser is a Fraud…Story Came From Law and Order SVU.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also amplified the claim on his website InfoWars. Even Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, retweeted the clip, according to a CNN report from 2019.
During Carroll’s 2023 civil trial against Trump, his lawyer, Joe Tacopina, brought up the episode. While testifying in that trial, Carroll’s lawyer Michael Ferrara asked her if she was “making up your allegation based on a popular TV show?”
“No,” Carroll responded. “No.”
