A US federal appeals court on Monday upheld a jury verdict ordering President-elect Donald Trump to pay $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming writer E Jean Carroll.
A New York jury found after a nine-day civil trial last year that the former president had sexually abused Carroll in a Manhattan department store in 1996.
Trump was ordered to pay $2 million for sexual abuse and another $3 million for defaming Carroll, a former advice columnist for she magazine.
Trump denied the allegations and appealed the verdict, arguing that two other women who said Trump had also sexually assaulted them should not have been allowed to testify.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit disagreed. “We conclude that Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings,” they said.
“Further, he has not undertaken the burden of showing that any claimed error or combination of claimed errors affected his substantial rights as required to justify a new trial.”
Another jury awarded Carroll $83 million in a separate case he 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 Nov. 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 the Justice Department’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.
Trump was convicted in New York in May on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. Judge Juan Merchán recently rejected an attempt by the president-elect to overturn his conviction, but postponed the sentence indefinitely.
