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 $5 million 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 $83 million 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 also 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.
“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,” appellate judges wrote in their decision Monday.
This is a developing story
