Trump's Appeal in Sexual Assault Case Faces Skepticism: Will a New Trial Happen?

Lawyers for Donald Trump and E. Jean Carroll squared off Friday in lower Manhattan as the former president tries to convince a federal appeals court that he should get a new trial after a jury found he sexually abused and defamed the one-time columnist. A nine-member jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages following a two-week trial last year. Trump did not attend the trial or call any witnesses, but both the former president and Carroll were in court for Friday’s oral arguments. The hearing wrapped around 10:30 a.m. ET. The court will not issue a decision Friday and one is unlikely before November’s presidential election.

The court hearing brought Trump, the Republican nominee for president, back to what had become a familiar stop during the campaign — the corridors of a courthouse. Unlike the New York civil fraud trial and criminal trial related to hush money payments — where Trump spoke to cameras in the hallways claiming he was unfairly prosecuted and using the opportunity to campaign — there are no cameras inside federal court, though media tracked his motorcade.

The oral arguments in the roughly 25-minute hearing Friday focused on evidence admitted at trial, which Trump’s lawyers say was improperly shown to the jury. Trump attorney John Sauer argued that it was a “quintessential he-said-she-said case” that involves a plaintiff with a political motive to bring a story. Carroll is encouraged by Trump’s political enemies, he said.

At that point, one appellate judge cut off Sauer and instructed him to focus on the evidence that the appeal is based on.

Much of the arguments were in the weeds at the appellate hearing, getting into the admissibility of the testimony from Jessica Leeds, who testified during the trial and told the jury Trump groped her on an airplane in the 1970s.

“It was a crime then to grope someone on a plane, it is a crime today to grope someone on a plane,” said Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan.

The judges challenged Kaplan to clarify how Leeds fits the pattern that Carroll’s lawyers argued, questioning whether Leeds’ alleged assault on a public space of an airplane fits the pattern that would make it admissible.

Regarding the infamous “Access Hollywood” video, which was admitted at trial, Kaplan argued it would’ve been better admitted as a confession – a reference to a ruling penned by the trial judge who in denying Trump’s motion for a retrial said the video “could have been regarded by the jury as a sort of personal confession as to his behavior.”

Kaplan noted during the hearing that Trump was in court Friday, but he also had every chance to show up in court during the trial to take the stand in his own defense, which he did not do. She said the “Access Hollywood” tape and excerpts from Trump’s deposition were appropriately admitted at trial especially in the absence of Trump’s own testimony.

“He had every opportunity to take the stand and rebut all this evidence. He did not,” Kaplan said. “He did not put on a single witness in the civil case. We put on 11. But what we did put in is the video tape of Access Hollywood where he basically says, ‘I grab women by the p**** without their consent,’ and then in his deposition that I took and asked him about that video - what did he say? He embraced it your honor.”

Trump did not appear during the first Carroll trial, which is at issue in the appeals court hearing Friday, but he did attend most of the second trial with Carroll earlier this year, which he also lost.

The sexual abuse and defamation trial in 2023 was the first of several cases against Trump and marked the first time he was found liable for sexually abusing a woman. Carroll testified in vivid detail that Trump raped her in a New York department store in the mid-1990s and then defamed her in 2019 when he denied the attack, said she wasn’t his type and suggested Carroll made up the story to sell copies of a new book. The jury returned the verdict within three hours of deliberating, finding that Trump sexually abused Carroll but that she had not proven that Trump raped her. Trump does not face jail time in the case.

The case is separate from a related defamation trial that was held earlier this year. A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in damages after finding Trump defamed her in 2022 when he repeated similar statements about Carroll.

In appealing the 2023 judgment, Trump’s attorneys have argued the trial judge made mistakes by allowing the jury to hear evidence from two other women who claimed Trump sexually assaulted them – one in the 1970s and another in 2005. They also argued that the judge should not have permitted Carroll’s attorneys to play the highly charged “Access Hollywood” video in which Trump is caught on a hot mic describing how he grabs women. “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait,” Trump says.

Trump’s lawyers also said the judge “unreasonably restricted” the former president’s cross-examination of witnesses by precluding them from asking questions about billionaire Reid Hoffman, a Democrat who contributed to Carroll’s litigation, and cutting off arguments his attorneys sought to make about Trump critic George Conway’s conversations with Carroll ahead of her lawsuit. They also said the judge was wrong to stop them from questioning Carroll about statements she made relating to Trump’s DNA and the dress she kept from the department store encounter.

“The involvement of Conway and Hoffman was concrete evidence demonstrating that Plaintiff and others had manufactured their claims for political reasons. In a trial that also included testimony regarding a late-1970s flight, there was no basis for concluding—and the district court did not explain itself—that such evidence would have been unduly prejudicial,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.

Carroll’s lawyers argue that the judge’s rulings on evidence were proper. They argued the judge was correct to allow the testimony of the two accusers since Carroll needed to prove that Trump assaulted her. Their testimony, Carroll’s lawyers said, was evidence of Trump’s modus operandi.

“As their testimony shows, Trump engaged in a pattern of abruptly lunging at a woman in a semi-public place, pressing his body against her, kissing her, and sexually touching her without consent, and later categorically denying the allegations and declaring that the accuser was too unattractive for him to have assaulted her,” Carroll’s lawyers wrote .

“Trump cannot show any abuse of discretion in the district court’s careful evidentiary rulings. And even if he could, Trump would not be entitled to a new trial given the overwhelming evidence supporting the verdict in Carroll’s favor,” Carroll’s attorneys wrote.

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.