 "Court upholds $5 million verdict against President-elect Trump for sexual abuse and defamation")
A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a jury verdict requiring President-elect Donald Trump to pay $5 million in damages for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.
The verdict, delivered after a nine-day civil trial in New York last year, concluded that Trump had sexually abused Carroll in a Manhattan department store in 1996. The jury awarded Carroll, a former advice columnist for Elle magazine $2 million for sexual abuse and an additional $3 million for defamation, stemming from Trump’s public denials and disparaging remarks about the former Elle magazine advice columnist.
Trump denied the allegations and appealed the verdict on the grounds that two other women who said Trump had sexually assaulted them too should not have been allowed to testify.
The longtime magazine columnist had testified at a 2023 trial that Trump turned a friendly encounter in spring 1996 into a violent attack after they playfully entered the store’s dressing room.
Trump skipped the trial after repeatedly denying the attack ever happened. But he 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 in 2019 after Carroll first made the accusations publicly in a memoir.
The three-judge panel of the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed.
“We conclude that Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings,” they said.
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More Shorts“Further, he 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.”
Carroll was awarded $83 million by another jury in a separate case she brought against Trump. He has also appealed that verdict.
Two federal cases brought against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith have been dismissed since he won the November 5 presidential election.
Trump was accused of mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House and seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election but Smith dropped the cases under a Justice Department policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.
Trump was convicted in New York in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Judge Juan Merchan recently rejected a bid by the president-elect to have his conviction thrown out but has postponed sentencing indefinitely.
With inputs from agencies.
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