A US federal appeals court on Monday upheld a jury’s finding in a civil case that Donald Trump sexually assaulted a columnist in a dressing room at an upscale department store in the mid-1990s.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a written opinion upholding the $5 million verdict awarded by a Manhattan jury to E. Jane Carroll is charged with defamation and sexual assault.
The longtime magazine columnist testified in the 2023 trial that Trump turned a friendly encounter in the spring of 1996 into a violent attack after they playfully entered a store dressing room.
Trump was absent from the trial after repeatedly denying that the attack had occurred. But he testified briefly in a defamation trial earlier this year that resulted in $83.3 million in damages. The second trial resulted from comments made by then-President Trump in 2019 after Carroll made the accusations publicly for the first time in his memoir.
In its ruling, a three-judge panel of the appeals court rejected claims by Trump’s lawyers that Judge Louis A. Kaplan made several decisions that skewed the trial, including his decision to allow two other women who accused Trump of sexual assault to stand trial. For testimony.
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The judge also allowed the jury to watch the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump bragged in 2005 about grabbing women’s genitals because when someone’s a star, “you can do anything.”
“We conclude that Mr. Trump has not proven that the district court erred in any of the contested rulings,” the Second Circuit said. “Moreover, he has not met the burden of proving that any alleged error or combination of alleged errors affected his fundamental rights as required to justify a new trial.”
In September, Carroll, 81, and Trump, 78, attended oral arguments before the Second Circuit.
Trump was elected by voters who delivered “an overwhelming mandate, demanding an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and the rapid dismissal of all witch hunts, including” the Democratic-funded Carroll Hoax, which will continue, Trump spokesman Stephen Cheung said in a statement. “Resume it.”
“E. Jane Carroll and I are grateful for today’s decision,” Roberta Kaplan, an attorney who represented Carroll during the trial and is not related to the judge, said in a statement. We thank the Second Circuit for its careful consideration of the parties’ arguments.”
The first jury in May 2023 found that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll and defamed her with comments he made in October 2022. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million.
In January, a second jury awarded Carroll an additional $83.3 million in damages for comments Trump made about her while he was president, finding them defamatory. The jury had been instructed by the judge to accept the first jury’s finding that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll.
Trump testified for less than three minutes in the second trial and was not allowed to challenge the jury’s conclusions in May 2023. However, he was animated in the courtroom throughout the two-week trial, and jurors could hear him ranting about the case.
& Edition 2024 The Canadian Press
