Jan. 15 (UPI) — President-elect Donald Trump has once again asked a federal appeals court to reconsider a jury’s guilty verdict that him liable for sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s.
His lawyers submitted the request Tuesday, seeking a full court of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to hear the case after a three-judge panel late last month let stand the guilty verdict and the $5 million judgment he was ordered to pay his victim.
Trump, who is to be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, was found liable by a New York jury in 2023, of sexually abusing Carroll in a Manhattan department storm dressing room and then defaming her by denying the assault after she made it public during his first term in the White House.
In the Tuesday filing, Trump’s lawyers argued the court erred by admitting testimony from two women who accused Trump of sexual assault and a recording from the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump is heard making derogatory remarks about women and claiming he could grab women by their genitalia because he is a celebrity.
“To have any chance of persuading a jury, Carroll’s implausible, unsubstantiated allegations had to be — and repeatedly were propped up by the erroneous admission of highly inflammatory propensity evidence,” Trump’s defense wrote in the court document.
“These legal errors — if left uncorrected — will lead to the improper, highly damaging admission of inflammatory propensity evidence in a wide range of future cases,” they warned.
Carroll has twice taken Trump to trial over the issue.
In a second case, Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages for defaming her by denying that he had sexually abused her.