Trump loses appeal of E Jean Carroll verdict finding him liable for sexual abuse and defamation
A federal appeals court upheld a ruling against Donald Trump after he challenged a jury’s verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming a former magazine writer.
Monday’s decision from a three-judge panel with New York’s 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals follows a May 2023 verdict awarding E Jean Carroll $5m for the former president’s ongoing defamation by denying claims that he sexually assaulted her in a department store in 1996.
In January, a second jury in a separate trial ordered Trump to pay Carroll more than $83m in damages for his defamatory statements about the former Elle magazine writer.
Trump argued the verdict from the 2023 judgment should be tossed out on his claims that the trial judge should not have let jurors hear testimony from two other women who accused him of sexual misconduct.
One of those women, Jessica Leeds, testified that Trump groped her on a plane in the late 1970s. Another woman, former People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff, said Trump forcibly kissed her at Mar-a-Lago in 2005.
Trump’s lawyers also said jurors should not have listened to his comments on the so-called Access Hollywood tape, on which the president-elect brags about grabbing women’s genitals.
Appellate judges denied Trump’s demand for a new trial.
“Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings,” and Trump “has not carried his burden to show that any claimed error or combination of claimed errors affected his substantial rights as required to warrant a new trial,” they wrote.
“The jury made its assessment of the facts and claims on a properly developed record,” according to Monday’s decision.
Even if the trial judge somehow “erred in some of these evidentiary rulings — a proposition that we have rejected — taking the record as a whole and considering the strength of Ms Carroll’s case, we are not persuaded that any claimed error or combination of errors in the district court’s evidentiary rulings affected Mr Trump’s substantial rights,” the judges wrote.
“Both E Jean Carroll and I are gratified by today’s decision,” Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said in a statement to The Independent. “We thank the Second Circuit for its careful consideration of the parties’ arguments.”
Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing while insisting he never met Carroll, whom he has branded a liar. He has called the case a “hoax.”
After attending brief oral arguments in September in his appeal, Trump held a rambling press conference in Trump Tower, detailing the allegations against him in two defamation cases he lost and stating he was “very disappointed” in his legal team as several of his attorneys stood beside him.
He also repeated allegedly defamatory statements that have landed verdicts against him.
