A panel of a federal appeals court confirmed this Monday the verdict of a jury that declared responsible to the president-elect of the United StatesDonald Trump, of sexually abusing journalist E. Jean Carrollas well as defaming her, and orders her to pay 5 million dollars. “Upon review, we conclude that Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings,” the panel wrote in its decision.
Trump’s legal team has been trying in recent months overturn a verdict of a civil court made up of nine members of a jury that found Trump responsible for defaming and sexually abusing the writer Carroll and that ordered the Republican politician to pay 5 million dollars.
At the May 2023 trial, those nine members heard evidence and testimony related to Carroll’s indictment, which alleged that, in the mid-1990s, Trump He sexually abused her in a store fitting room and slandered her after she went public with the story.
Trump, who won the presidential election this year, keep denying those facts and has repeated on several occasions that he does not even know Carroll. This year, the Republican magnate faced a second trial with Carroll for defamation for continuing to deny his story, which ended in an $83 million sentence for Trump.
“He said, she said”
Trump’s legal team continues to appeal that verdict, but this Monday’s decision is a blow to his defense, since he was relying on the previous sentence for sexual abuse. In his appeal against the first trial, Trump demanded that he be granted a new trialWell, according to his legal team, the jury heard improper testimony.
In September, Trump’s lawyer classified the case before the panel as a “he said, she said” affair and noted that the alleged evidence was “implausible.” The mogul’s lawyer also pointed out that Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, who testified about alleged abuses by Trump that bore similarities to Carroll’s accusations, should not have been allowed to take the stand.
The panel rejected all of those arguments on Monday and determined that the testimony of the other two women who accused Trump of sexual misconduct were legitimately admitted into evidenceas well as the recording in which Trump is heard bragging about having sexually grabbed women without their permission.
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 “behaved similarly toward other women, a pattern of abrupt physical contact and non-consensual toward women he barely knew. “Mr. Trump’s statements on the tape, along with the testimony of Leeds and Stoynoff, establish a repeated and idiosyncratic pattern of conduct consistent with what Carroll asserted,” the panel wrote.
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