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An appellate court in New York on Friday rejected President Donald Trump’s bid to toss out a jury’s verdict that the president sexually abused and defamed former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll.
The full panel of judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit declined to hear Trump’s arguments, leaving Trump the option to turn to the Supreme Court as the last form of relief in a yearslong case that stemmed from Carroll’s shocking claim in 2019 that Trump raped her in a dressing room three decades ago.
In his appeal, Trump challenged evidence that Carroll’s legal team introduced to the jury during the civil lawsuit, including the Access Hollywood tape that surfaced during Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Two Trump-appointed judges on the appellate court dissented and said they would have granted Trump’s request and reconsidered the verdict.
The pair of judges said the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump lewdly spoke about making passes at women, did not offer relevant context in relation to Carroll’s claims. The tape functioned as “propensity evidence,” which is typically inadmissible in court, the judges said.
“If the panel opinion remains a precedent of our court, a future plaintiff or the government will be able to introduce evidence of prior conduct in which a defendant went on a mundane outing and sometime thereafter made a sexual advance,” they wrote in their dissent.
Carroll sued Trump, a one-time New York real estate mogul, twice after she released her book in 2019, which claimed Trump raped her during a brief encounter with him in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.
Trump vigorously denied the claims, saying he had never met Carroll, that she was not his “type” and that she fabricated the incident to sell books. His vocal and repeated criticisms and denials led to Carroll’s defamation allegations.
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The appellate court’s decision on Friday relates to a lawsuit Carroll brought in 2022, in which a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded Carroll $5 million. The jury also found Trump did not rape Carroll, as Carroll had alleged.
Carroll brought a second lawsuit right after her book release, alleging Trump defamed her in the aftermath of the book being published. A jury in that lawsuit awarded Carroll $83 million. Trump is also appealing that decision.
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