Elite Law Firm in Civil War Over Trump Sex Abuse Case
A civil war has broken out among partners at an elite law firm over its work for Donald Trump on a sex abuse case.
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Sullivan & Cromwell, a multinational legal powerhouse headquartered in New York City, is helping the 80-year-old president prepare a request for the Supreme Court to review an earlier ruling on a lawsuit brought against him by E. Jean Carroll, 82, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The move has sparked uproar among the firm’s top ranks. “The Carroll cases were of particular concern for some lawyers because of the nature of Carroll’s allegations,” the newspaper writes, adding that firms of this size “rarely take on such cases for fear of reputational damage.”
Carroll, a former journalist, accused Trump in 2023 of sexually assaulting her 30 years previously during what the newspaper says was a “chance meeting at a department store.” A jury awarded her $5 million in damages. The judge said Trump raped her in the “common” sense of the word, but not in the “narrow, technical” definition outlined in law.
She sued him again a year later, claiming he had defamed her with his comments about the first case. She also won that action, which saw Trump ordered to pay Carroll a further $83 million in damages.
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Trump appealed the sexual abuse verdict in 2025 and lost that September. He then asked the Supreme Court to review the case. It declined in June. He has now hired Sullivan & Cromwell to ask for a SCOTUS review of the defamation verdict. That work has come even though the Journal’s sources say the firm’s co-chairman, Robert Giuffra, 66, promised partners the firm would not touch the Carroll cases.
Giuffra apparently made the pledge after the group agreed last year to help Trump try to overturn his conviction for falsifying business records and a civil fraud ruling that found he misrepresented the value of his assets and net worth for more than a decade. It has otherwise “tightly controlled” information about its representation of the president, the Journal reports.
The co-chairman appears to have taken the work on at the urging of Trump’s personal attorney, Boris Epshteyn, 43. Some partners, the Journal reports, have “complained to colleagues and people outside the firm about a lack of transparency from Sullivan & Cromwell’s leadership regarding the firm’s work for the president.” Others have apparently lamented that the firm risks becoming a “one-stop shop for Trump’s highest-profile personal legal matters.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the law firm for comment on this story.
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