A federal appeals court upheld a New York jury’s guilty verdict finding President-elect Donald Trump liable in the E. Jean Carroll sex abuse and defamation case.
In May, the jury found that Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll – but that there was not enough evidence to say he had raped her.
The panel of six men and three women also found that Trump injured advice columnist Carroll in a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996 and defamed her when he called her a liar, ordering him to pay a total of $5 million in damages.
They made their decision after just three hours of deliberation.
In September, Trump appeared at the federal appeals court in New York as his lawyers fought to overturn the verdict.
The former president’s motorcade was seen pulling up to the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan where attorneys presented oral arguments before a panel of three judges – all of whom were appointed to the bench by Democratic presidents.
Dressed in his trademark navy suit and bright red tie, Trump entered the courtroom and walked straight past Carroll, who was sitting in the front row of the public gallery.
It marks the presidential candidate’s first time in court since his assassination attempt in July, and security was tight, with attendees required to go through metal detectors upon arrival.
All phones and other electronics were banned from the courtroom.
The Republican nominee is contesting the May 2023 verdict stemming from his alleged mid-1990s encounter with Carroll, who claimed Trump sexually assaulted her at Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room and later defamed her when he publicly denied her allegations.
His attorneys claim the trial court erred by allowing in certain evidence such as the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump can be heard boasting about grabbing women’s genitals, as well as testimony from other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct decades ago.
In his two-minute rebuttal, Trump’s attorney John Sauer called the case ‘a textbook example of implausible allegations being propped up by highly inflammatory, inadmissible’ evidence.
He also reiterated Trump’s claims from his testimony that the presidential candidate has never ‘even met’ Carroll.
Addressing the panel, Sauer called the lawsuit a ‘quintessential “he said, she said” case’ that was lacking in ‘physical evidence’, ‘eyewitnesses’, and police records.
Circuit Judge Denny Chin interrupted Sauer’s argument, noting it’s ‘very hard to overturn a jury verdict based on evidentiary rulings’ and asked him why the verdict should be thrown out.
Sauer questioned US District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s decision to allow the Access Hollywood tape and testimony from Jessica Leeds, who accused Trump of groping her on a plane in the late 1970s, to be heard as evidence.
He argued that the statute that would deem Trump’s alleged conduct a crime wasn’t enacted until 15 years later.
But Judge Chin asked if Trump ‘put his hands up her skirt’, wouldn’t that count?
Sauer reiterated that Leeds’s evidence should have been excluded.
Judge Chin pressed Sauer further about the Access Hollywood tape and said that it was a ‘confession about a modus operandi’.
Responding to Sauer’s arguments before the panel, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan stood by the evidence presented at the trial.
She insisted that Leeds’s testimony was admissible under a law that was in effect in 1979, and therefore the incident would have been considered a crime as the trial judge, Lewis Kaplan, concluded.
The lawyer also argued that Trump has a ‘pattern’ of attacking women that begins with ‘pleasantly chatting’ them up before suddenly ‘pouncing’ on them and subsequently trashing the women when he is accused.
She added that Trump had refused to testify or even attend the trial despite being given the opportunity.
A jury found that Trump was liable for sexually assaulting Carroll, a journalist, in the mid-1990s.
Jurors awarded the former Elle magazine advice columnist $2.02million and $2.98million for her sexual assault and defamation claims respectively, in a May 2023 judgment.
Trump was separately found liable for defaming Carroll in a second trial that took place in January this year where a jury ordered him to pay her $83.3million for having defamed her and damaging her reputation in June 2019 after she first accused him of rape.
In both denials, Trump said he didn’t know Carroll, that she was ‘not my type,’ and that she made up her story to promote her memoir.
In their appeal, filed in November, Trump’s lawyers claimed he couldn’t get a fair trial in New York.
The former president claimed that Judge Kaplan ‘erred’ in rulings during the May 2023 trial that ‘violated President Trump’s rights’.
The filing stated: ‘The improper verdict in this case is a gross miscarriage of justice, backed by political operatives long opposed to President Trump and his politics, based on false and unsupported claims’
In other legal filings, Trump’s lawyers claimed the attack on Carroll ‘never occurred’.
He accused her of making up the claims because of her ‘significant political bias against him’ and ‘turned her allegations against (Trump) into a lifestyle and sought to monetize her allegations as much as possible’.
Rather than being harmed by the claims, Carroll’s standing has improved due to her media interviews, Trump’s lawyers claimed.
Carroll’s cases are separate from multiple criminal cases against the former US president.
Trump is due to be sentenced on September 18 at a state court in New York for falsifying business records relating to a $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts earlier this year after a blockbuster trial.
He is also facing a $450million fine after losing a civil fraud case brought by New York state prosecutors, and two possible criminal trials in Washington and Atlanta over election interference.
Neither of the trials are expected to take place before the election.
A third criminal case in Florida related to mishandling classified documents was recently thrown out by a judge. Her decision is being appealed by prosecutors.
Trump denies all the allegations.
