A panel consisting of three federal appeals court judges on Monday upheld the jury verdict that found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll.
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A panel consisting of three federal judges on Monday ruled against Donald Trump and upheld a New York jury’s unanimous verdict that held the president-elect liable for sexually abusing author E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s.
Trump’s lawyers had argued that various errors marred the trial and that the verdict, which awarded Carroll $5 million, should be overturned.
Specifically, the president-elect’s attorneys claimed that two women who detailed similar attacks should not have been allowed to testify, and that the famous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump confessed to sexually assaulting women should not have been admissible as evidence.
The panel of judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit disagreed.
“We conclude that the Access Hollywood tape described conduct that was sufficiently similar in material respects to the conduct alleged by Ms. Carroll (and Ms. Leeds and Ms. Stoynoff) to show the existence of a pattern tending to prove the actus reus [i.e., the physical element of a crime], and not mere propensity,” the ruling states.
The judges note in their opinion that, in each of the encounters presented to the jury, i.e., the one involving Carroll and the other two women, “Mr. Trump engaged in an ordinary conversation with a woman he barely knew, then abruptly lunged at her in a semi-public place and proceeded to kiss and forcefully touch her without her consent.”
Taken together with Trump’s statements on the tape, the testimony “[establishes] a repeated, idiosyncratic pattern of conduct consistent with what Ms. Carroll alleged.”
In a separate trial, the writer was awarded $83.3 million in defamation damages because the president-elect continues to deny her story.
Conversely, ABC News and This Week host George Stephanopoulos earlier this month settled a lawsuit Trump had filed after the news anchor had repeatedly stated that the jury held the president-elect “liable for rape.”
As a result, ABC agreed to contribute $15 million for Trump’s future presidential library and pay $1 million in legal costs.
Stephanopoulos would have been correct if he had said that the jury found him “liable for sexual abuse.”
In addition, he also would have been correct in stating that the presiding judge in the trial stated that the jury’s “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.’”
The judge added that, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
The president-elect and his allies had celebrated this settlement as a major victory when, in reality, Stephanopoulos simply should have chosen his words a bit more carefully.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
