Trump loses bid for appeals court bid to rehear E. Jean Carroll case

President Donald Trump on Friday lost his latest effort to overturn a civil jury verdict holding him liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and then defaming her when she went public with her claims decades later.

A majority of judges on the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York rejected Trump's request for that court's full bench to rehear his challenge to the verdict. It is one of two defamation-related verdicts that Carroll obtained against the president.

The denial came six months after a three-judge panel on 2nd Circuit upheld a 2023 Manhattan federal jury's verdict, which ordered Trump to pay Carroll $5 million in damages.

Two judges on the 2nd Circuit — both of whom were nominated by Trump to that bench — dissented from Friday's decision not to grant him a so-called en banc rehearing of his appeal.

Trump could ask the Supreme Court to hear his appeal, but that court is not obligated to do so.

A spokesman for Trump's legal team suggested the president would take that step, saying that the "Democrat-funded Carroll Hoax" will "continue to be appealed."

"President Trump will keep winning against Liberal Lawfare, as he is focusing on his mission to Make America Great Again," the spokesman said in a statement.

Carroll's attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said, "E. Jean Carroll is very pleased with today's decision."

"Although President Trump continues to try every possible maneuver to challenge the findings of two separate juries, those efforts have failed. He remains liable for sexual assault and defamation," Kaplan said.

Both this lawsuit and the other suit filed by Carroll relate to her claim that Trump defamed her in statements denying her 2019 allegation that he sexually assaulted her in a dressing room in the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the 1990s.

Carroll's first suit in Manhattan federal court, which related to comments that Trump made about her in 2019, ended with a January 2024 verdict in her favor. Jurors in that case awarded her $83.3 million in damages from Trump for defaming her.

A panel of 2nd Circuit judges is scheduled to hear oral arguments on June 24 in Trump's appeal of the verdict in that case.

On Wednesday, the appeals court denied a request from Trump's attorneys to delay those arguments until the court decides whether the United States can replace Trump as the defendant in that case on the grounds that he is president.

Carroll sued Trump again in 2022, for battery and defamation, after New York passed a law that temporarily allowed people to file claims of sexual assault for alleged incidents that occurred outside the normal statute of limitations.

That case, which was the subject of Friday's decision by the 2nd Circuit, included claims about the incident in the store and Trump's statements about the writer in 2022.

In his written dissent arguing that the full 2nd Circuit should have reheard the appeal, Judge Steven Menashi said the three-judge appeals panel that upheld the jury's verdict "sanctioned striking departures" from legal precedent "to justify the irregular judgment in this case."

Menashi wrote that Manhattan District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the trial of Caroll's lawsuit, excluded key evidence, allowing her attorneys to more easily argue that Trump's comments met the legal standard for defamation.

The dissent also disputed Kaplan's interpretation of legal rules that allowed "stale witness testimony about a brief encounter that allegedly occurred forty-five years earlier."

That testimony came from Jessica Leeds, a woman who told jurors that during an encounter with Trump on an airplane, he "grabbed [her] with his hands, tried to kiss [her], grabbed [her] breasts, and pulled [her] towards him," the dissent noted.

Menashi was joined in his dissent by Judge Michael Park. Both judges were appointed to the circuit by Trump in 2019, during his first term in the White House.

Four other 2nd Circuit judges pushed back on Menashi and Park, writing that the "dissenting opinion would have us stray far from our proper role as a court of review."

Those judges said that an en banc rehearing is almost always granted to resolve "a question of exceptional importance or a conflict between the panel's opinion and appellate precedent."

"The dissenting opinion ignores this rule of restraint," they wrote.

Two of the three circuit court judges who rejected Trump's effort to overturn the verdict in December filed a separate statement endorsing the majority's view that "the criteria for en banc rehearing have not been met."

Those judges, Denny Chin and Susan Carney, responded at length to Menashi's arguments.

"Even on his own terms, our dissenting colleague fails to explain why any purported error warrants a retrial or full court review," Chin and Carney wrote.