Former US President Donald Trump is appealing a $5 million award to a woman a jury found he sexually assaulted.
Former US President Donald Trump is appealing the verdict of a New York jury that awarded $5 million to a magazine columnist after jurors concluded that Trump sexually abused her in the 1990s. and defamed her last October.
A notice of appeal was filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court, the first step in a process that will move the civil case brought against Trump by writer E Jean Carroll to a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
The notice was signed by Trump’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, who said after Tuesday’s verdict that he believed there were multiple strong grounds to appeal.
The nine-person jury concluded after less than three hours of deliberations that Carroll had failed to show that Trump was more likely to have raped her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman store in the early spring of 1996. But it found that she he had been sexually abused.
He also said in his verdict that Trump smeared Carroll in a statement on social media last October.
Carroll sued Trump in November, minutes after a temporary New York state law went into effect that allows victims of sexual assault to sue their abusers even if the abuse occurred decades earlier.
Carroll is also considering new lawsuits against Trump after he smeared her yet again on primetime television this week.
At a televised “town hall” meeting Wednesday aired on CNN, Trump repeated comments that formed the basis of Carroll’s successful defamation claim, telling news anchor Kaitlan Collins that Carroll was a “kook” who fabricated the assault, which was met with hisses and cheers from the Republican audience.
During the interview, Trump insulted respected Manhattan federal court judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over his case.
Asked if she was considering further legal action in light of Trump’s latest comments, Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, told the New York Daily News that she was “thinking about it.”
Trump’s attorney, Tacopina, declined to comment on the potential new lawsuit.
In the notice of appeal filed in the lower court on Thursday where Judge Kaplan presided over the trial, Trump’s lawyers wrote that Defendant Donald J Trump is “hereby notified to appeal” to the second circuit.
Tacopina said in an email about the appeal: “Judge Kaplan was already overturned once in Carroll v Trump. We are sure it will be twice after this appeal is heard.”
He was referring to Kaplan’s rejection of an attempt to replace Trump with the United States as a defendant in an earlier defamation suit brought by Carroll over statements Trump made while he was president. The Second Circuit later ruled that Trump was a government employee for the purposes of the lawsuit, but the appeal has not been fully resolved.
Trump’s verdict came after a two-week trial in which Carroll testified that he sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of the upscale department store after a light-hearted and flirtatious chance encounter that took them from the store’s entrance to the desolate lingerie area on the sixth floor. where Trump invited Carroll to help him buy a gift.
He first publicly revealed his experience in a 2019 memoir when Trump was still president. She said the public response to her was so harsh that it ruined her reputation, cost her a 27-year job with Elle magazine and subjected her to social media attacks from her followers.
Trump, who is currently running for president as a Republican, did not attend the trial.
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