Trump loses appeal of E Jean Carroll verdict finding him liable for sexual abuse and defamation
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A jury awarded the former Elle columnist $5 million 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.
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.
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. Appellate judges denied Trump’s deman 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.
