On Friday, a federal appeals court rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn a lower court’s ruling in his $5 million sexual abuse case involving former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll.
The decision, initially reported by Politico’s Kyle Cheney on the X platform, originated from a divided Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where all 11 judges participated en banc. This ruling upheld a three-judge decision made on December 30 to enforce the jury’s award.
Carroll, who is now 81 years old, claimed that Trump assaulted her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan around 1996, and subsequently defamed her in an October 2022 post on Truth Social, labeling her accusation as a hoax.
In May 2023, a jury determined that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll and defamed her through false statements. However, the jury did not find that Trump had raped her, as she had initially alleged.
In his request for reconsideration, Trump contended that the trial judge erred by permitting jurors to view the 2005 Access Hollywood video, in which he bragged about his sexual conduct, along with what he referred to as a “pile-on” of prejudicial evidence related to allegations from two other women.
According to Cheney’s report on X, two of the judges appointed by Trump, Steven Menashi and Michael Park, dissented from the en banc decision, arguing that the judge should not have allowed the admission of ‘propensity’ evidence such as the Access Hollywood tape.
One accuser, businesswoman Jessica Leeds, asserted that Trump groped her on a plane during the late 1970s. The other accuser, former People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff, claimed he forcibly kissed her at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2005. Trump has refuted both allegations.
Trump, who will turn 79 on Saturday, is also contesting an $83.3 million jury verdict rendered in January 2024, which determined he defamed Carroll and damaged her reputation in June 2019 when he initially denied her claim regarding the incident at Bergdorf Goodman.
In this appeal, Trump argues that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in July granting him extensive criminal immunity also protects him from civil liability in Carroll’s case.
In his statements from 2019 and 2022 denying Carroll’s accusations, Trump maintained that she was “not my type” and suggested she fabricated the story to promote her memoir.
Trump may also confront a third lawsuit from Carroll concerning a post he made on his Truth Social account during the Memorial Day observance a year ago.
“Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for ‘DEFAMATION,’” Trump stated.
She was unaware of when the alleged event occurred – sometime in the 1990s – never submitted a police report, did not need to present the ‘dress’ she claimed to have (which tested negative!), and praised me during the first half of her CNN interview with Alison Cooper, but altered her narrative in the latter half – I wonder why (UNDER APPEAL!)? The rape charge was dismissed by a jury! Or perhaps it was Arthur Engoron, the eccentric New York State judge who imposed a fine of nearly 500 million dollars (UNDER APPEAL) for having done absolutely nothing wrong, who utilized a statute that has never been applied before, denied me a jury trial, and assessed Mar-a-Lago at $18,000,000 – Now for Merchan!” he remarked.
Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, verified to Newsweek that her client was contemplating yet another lawsuit.
“We have stated multiple times since the last jury verdict in January that all options remain available. This continues to hold true today. All options are on the table,” Kaplan expressed in a statement at that time.
