(The Hill) — A federal appeals court panel on Monday upheld a jury’s verdict finding President-elect Donald Trump liable for sexually assaulting advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and ordering him to pay $5 million.
A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit concluded that Trump did not sufficiently show any claimed errors affected his rights or warranted a new trial.
“On review for abuse of discretion, we conclude that Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings,” the panel wrote in its unsigned opinion.
Video below: In Sept. 2024, Trump calls for a new trial in E. Jean Carroll case.
The New York jury found Trump liable last year for sexually abusing Carroll, an advice columnist, in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s and defaming her by denying her story when she came forward during Trump’s presidency.
In a separate case, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3 million in defamation damages for continuing to deny her story. Trump is still appealing that verdict.
The Hill has reached out to spokespeople for Trump and Carroll for comment.
The panel determined that testimony from two other women who accused Trump of sexual misconduct and the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump is heard bragging about sexually grabbing women without their permission, was rightfully admitted as evidence.
Jessica Leeds, one of the women, testified that Trump kissed and groped her on an airplane in 1978 or 1979. The other woman, Natasha Stoynoff, testified that Trump pushed her against a wall and kissed her while she was assigned to a story for People magazine about the anniversary of Trump’s marriage to his wife, Melania, and the arrival of his son, Baron.
Trump denies both Stoynoff’s and Leeds’ accusations.
The appeals court panel wrote that the combination of the women’s testimony, plus the tape, showed that a jury could reasonably infer that Trump “engaged in similar conduct with other women — a pattern of abrupt, nonconsensual, and physical advances on women he barely knew.”
“Mr. Trump’s statements in the tape, together with the testimony of Ms. Leeds and Ms. Stoynoff, establish a repeated, idiosyncratic pattern of conduct consistent with what Ms. Carroll alleged,” the panel wrote.
