The former president Donald Trump was found guilty of sexually assaulting and defaming author E Jean Carroll, and he unsuccessfully sought a new trial.
Trump’s attorneys failed to demonstrate that the decision in his civil trial in May was a “seriously erroneous result,” according to US District Judge Lewis Kaplan.
The former president intends to appeal the case once more, according to his attorneys.
Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room in Manhattan in the 1990s in 2019.
Although the statute of limitations passed for Carroll to press criminal charges, she sued Trump under New York’s Adult Survivors Law in 2022.
A jury found Trump liable for sexual assault, battery, and defamation, but did not find him liable for rape.
The jury rewarded Carroll about $3million in damages for the defamation charge, and about $2million for sexual battery.
Trump’s attorneys tried to argue that the $2million sum was ‘excessive’ because he was ultimately found not liable for rape.
‘Such abuse could have included groping of the Plaintiff’s breasts through clothing or similar conduct, which is a far cry from rape,’ Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopino told the court.
In ruling against the retrial, Judge Kaplan explicitly rejected Tacopino’s comparison.
‘This jury did not award Ms Carroll more than $2 million for groping her breasts through her clothing, wrongful as that might have been,’ Kaplan wrote in his decision.
He continued: ‘there was no evidence at all of such behavior. Instead, the proof convincingly established, and the jury implicitly found, that Mr Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm.’
Judge Kaplan rejected the arguments, stating that that the jury only found him not liable based on the New York penal code’s narrow definition of rape.
According to Kaplan, the jury did find him liable for actions that would fall under the ‘common’ understanding of the word ‘rape.’
‘Mr Trump’s argument therefore ignores the bulk of the evidence at trial, misinterprets the jury’s verdict, and (ignored) evidence of what actually occurred between Ms Carroll and Mr Trump,’ he wrote.