NEW YORK (AP) In a civil lawsuit, a federal appeals court on Monday affirmed a jury’s verdict that Donald Trump had sexually assaulted a woman in a changing room at a high-end department shop in the mid-1990s.
The Manhattan jury awarded E. Jean Carroll $5 million for slander and sexual abuse, and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this decision in a written judgment.
After they playfully entered the store’s dressing area in the spring of 1996, the longtime magazine columnist testified at a 2023 trial that Trump escalated a nice encounter into a violent attack.
Trump continually denied the attack ever occurred, therefore he chose not to attend the trial. However, earlier this year, he provided brief testimony at a follow-up defamation trial that ended in an award of $83.3 million.Following Carroll’s initial public claims in a memoir, then-President Trump’s remarks in 2019 led to the second trial.
The appeals court’s three-judge majority dismissed arguments from Trump’s attorneys that trial judge Lewis A. Kaplan had ruined the trial by allowing two other women who had accused Trump of sexually abusing them to speak, among other decisions.
Because you can do anything when you’re famous, the judge also permitted the jury to watch the notorious Access Hollywood tape, on which Trump boasted in 2005 about grabbing women’s genitalia.
According to the 2nd Circuit, Mr. Trump has not shown that the district court made a mistake in any of the contested decisions. In addition, he has failed to prove that any one of the alleged errors—or all of the alleged errors—affected his substantial rights, which is necessary to support a new trial.
Trump, 78, and Carroll, 81, both attended the 2nd Circuit’s oral arguments in September.
According to a statement from Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung, Trump was elected by voters who gave him a resounding mandate. They also want the political weaponization of our legal system to stop immediately and all Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded Carroll Hoax, which is still being appealed, to be quickly put an end to.
In a statement, Roberta Kaplan, an attorney who represented Carroll throughout the trial and is unrelated to the judge, said: E. Jean Carroll and I are both pleased with today’s ruling. We express our gratitude to the Second Circuit for giving the parties’ arguments significant thought.
In May 2023, the first jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll and had defamed her with remarks he had made in October 2022. Carroll was given $5 million by that jury.
A second jury in January found that Trump’s remarks about Carroll during his time as president were defamatory and awarded her an additional $83.3 million in damages. The judge had told that panel to agree with the first jury’s conclusion that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll. That verdict’s appeal has not yet been heard.
During both trials, Carroll claimed that Trump’s public remarks ruined her career as an Elle magazine contributor, making her afraid to leave her upstate New York home and inspiring some to send her death threats.
Trump was not allowed to contest the verdicts of the May 2023 jury and gave testimony for less than three minutes during the second trial. Nevertheless, he remained energetic during the two-week trial, and jurors could hear him complaining about the case.
The evidence of witnesses who recalled Carroll telling them about the 1996 encounter with Trump shortly afterward was deemed inappropriate by Trump attorney D. John Sauer during appeals arguments in September due to the witnesses’ evident bias against Trump.
Additionally, according to the lawyer, the judge ought to have disregarded the testimony of the two women who said that Trump had sexually assaulted them in the 1970s and 2005. Trump has also refuted those claims.
According to the 2nd Circuit, in each of the three incidents, Mr. Trump was having a normal conversation with a woman he hardly knew when he suddenly lunged at her in a semi-public setting and kissed and physically touched her without getting her permission. There is enough similarity between the activities to reveal a pattern.
It claimed that the women’s testimony of the pattern of behavior they encountered was directly supported by the Access Hollywood tape.
People who report being sexually assaulted are not identified by the Associated Press until they come out in public, as Carroll has done.
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