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MANHATTAN (CN) — A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a New York jury’s finding in a civil case that Donald Trump sexually abused magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in an upscale Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals panel issued an unsigned written opinion rejecting Trump’s claims that a lower court erred in several evidentiary rulings at trial, and upholding the $5 million award that a federal jury granted to E. Jean Carroll in May 2023 for defamation and sexual abuse.
“As we have discussed, the district court did not abuse its discretion in making any of the challenged evidentiary rulings,” the three-judge panel wrote. “The jury made its assessment of the facts and claims on a properly developed record.”
Trump’s lawyers argued on appeal that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan abused his discretion in admitting evidence of other sexual assaults by Trump, including the Access Hollywood tape, and the trial testimonies of Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff.
“Even assuming arguendo that the district court 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 appeals court ruled.
The Second Circuit panel who heard Trump’s appeal was comprised of Barack Obama-appointed U.S. Circuit judges Denny Chin and Susan Carney, who were joined by U.S. Circuit Judge Myrna Perez, a Joe Biden appointee.
Carroll’s attorney Robbie Kaplan said Monday that she and Carroll are both “gratified” by the Second Circuit’s ruling and thanked the appeals court for its “careful consideration” of their arguments.
Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, testified at a 2023 trial that Trump turned a friendly run-in at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in 1996 into a violent rape after they playfully entered the store’s dressing room.
She went public with her story three decades later in 2019, during Trump’s first term as U.S. president, in her book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal,” and an excerpt published in New York Magazine.
She sued three years later, empowered by a new law in the Empire State that opened a small window for adult survivors of sexual assault to seek civil relief for claims otherwise barred by the statute of limitations. In addition to battery, she brought a civil defamation claim pointing to Trump’s broad denials of the rape accusations and his ensuing denigration of her appearance.
At Carroll’s first trial, Kaplan allowed her lawyers to play for jurors the 2005 hot-mic conversation between Trump, who then was hosting “The Apprentice” reality TV show, and “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush.
“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it,” Trump says in the tape as Bush laughs along.
“You can do anything,” he continues. “Grab them by the pussy.”
As the tape circulated widely leading up to the 2016 election, Trump dismissed his words as “locker room talk.”
Leeds testified at the trial that Trump tried to kiss her, grabbed her breasts and put his hand up her skirt before she managed to get away during a 1979 flight from Texas to New York. When the two later encountered one another at an event where Leeds was working, she testified that Trump said: “I remember you. You’re the cunt from the airplane.”
Stoynoff, a former People magazine writer, separately testified that Trump in 2005 pushed her against a wall at his Mar-a-Lago residence and started kissing her, even as she twice pushed him away, stopping only when a butler entered the room. Stoynoff said she was there to interview Trump and his third wife, Melania, who was pregnant with Trump’s youngest child that year.
Stoynoff’s charge is from the same year from the “Access Hollywood” tape. Her story echoes Carroll’s, who also says Trump first shoved her against a wall and began kissing her before forcing himself upon her.
The jury found Trump liable on both counts, awarding Carroll $5 million in damages: $2 million in compensatory damages for Trump sexually abusing her, plus $20,000 in punitive damages; and $1.7 million in damages for a reputation repair program, plus $1 million in other damages on the defamation count.
Trump later challenged the verdict and damages, arguing that the award was out of step with the jury’s decision that Carroll proved the battery count for sexual abuse but not rape as it is legally defined. Kaplan rejected the granular interpretation of the legal definition of the criminal act.
“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,’” Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Trump, who has repeatedly denied the attack happened, did not testify in person and did not attend Carroll’s first trial. Jurors in the first trial were shown portions of Trump’s videotaped October 2022 deposition testimony.
Trump briefly testified at a follow-up defamation trial earlier this year that resulted in an $83.3 million award.
The second trial resulted from comments then-President Trump made while in office after Carroll first made the accusations publicly.
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