Trump loses appeal of E Jean Carroll verdict finding him liable for sexual abuse and defamation

A jury awarded the former Elle columnist $5m in her first defamation trial against the former president

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.

A federal appeals court has upheld a jury’s verdict against Donald Trump finding him liable for sexually abusing and then defaming the writer E Jean Carroll (Gettys for Equality Now)

Jurors “could reasonably infer” from their testimony and the contents of the Access Hollywood tape that Trump “engaged in similar conduct with other women — a pattern of abrupt, nonconsensual, and physical advances on women,” the judges wrote.

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.

“I’ve never met the woman — other than this picture, which could have been AI-generated,” said Trump, referencing a photograph included in a 2019 New York magazine article that shows Carroll laughing beside Trump with his then-wife Ivana Trump in 1987.

Asked at the time whether Carroll will raise those claims in court or file additional defamation complaints, her attorney Roberta Kaplan told The Independent: “I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: all options are on the table.”

Trump also brought up allegations from Leeds, saying, “What are the chances of that happening?”

“She would not have been the chosen one,” he said.

On December 28, the president-elect shared an image to his Truth Social account showing him and Carroll with the all-caps caption: “SHOULD A WOMAN GO TO JAIL FOR FALSELY ACCUSING A MAN OF RAPE?”

“RETRUTH IF YOU WANT JUSTICE FOR TRUMP,” the message added.

After attending brief appeals court arguments in September, Trump held a press conference at his Trump Tower to deny the allegations against him (Getty)

Earlier this month, ABC and anchor George Stephanopoulos agreed to settle Trump’s defamation suit against the network for Stephanopoulos’s on-air statements about the jury’s findings in the first Carroll case.

Stephanopoulos incorrectly said the jury found Trump “liable for rape” rather than sexual abuse, though the trial judge overseeing the initial Carroll case explained that the difference is largely a semantic one.

“The finding that Ms Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote at the time. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial … makes clear, the jury found that Mr Trump in fact did exactly that.”

A jury’s unanimous verdict “was almost entirely” in her favor, but of “the only point on which Ms Carroll did not prevail was whether she had proved that Mr Trump had ‘raped’ her within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law,” Kaplan added.

But the judge overseeing Trump’s defamation suit disagreed that Stephanopoulos’s statements were “substantially” true — teeing up what would become a protracted legal battle if it went to trial.

The parties agreed to settle for $15m in the form of a donation to Trump’s presidential library.