A jury ruled former President Donald Trump responsible for sexually assaulting and defaming a writer, and he is now appealing that decision. The writer has stated that she is considering suing him a third time.
On Thursday afternoon, less than 48 hours after a Manhattan jury awarded columnist E Jean Carroll $5 million, Trump’s attorneys filed a notice of appeal in the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals. In the middle of the 1990s, Carroll allegedly had a sexual encounter with Trump in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman.
As a result of Carroll’s successful demonstration that Trump defamed her by labelling her case “a complete con job” and “a hoax and a lie,” jurors on Tuesday determined that Trump should pay Carroll around $2 million in damages for civil battery and over $3 million for her successful demonstration of this.
Trump’s team filed the appeal on the same day that Carroll said she may sue Trump a third time, after his scathing comments about her in a Wednesday night CNN town hall.
The ex-president in the televised town hall mocked Carroll as a ‘whack job’ and called the case ‘rigged’.
‘What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room?’ said Trump, as some of his supporters in the audience laughed.
Carroll said she was asleep while Trump criticized her and that her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, sent her a transcript of his remarks. She said she stopped reading after the first paragraph.
‘It’s just stupid, it’s just disgusting, vile, foul, it wounds people,’ Carroll told The New York Times on Thursday.
Carroll added that her 15-year-old son spoke about Trump’s remarks to her stylist.
‘I am upset on the behalf of young men in America,’ Carroll said. ‘They cannot listen to this balderdash and this old-timey view of women, which is a cave-man view.’
Kaplan said they have not decided if they will file a new defamation case. In addition to the rape and defamation case that concluded in Carroll’s favor, the writer has an earlier defamation case against Trump that remains pending.
‘Everything’s on the table, obviously, and we have to give serious consideration to it,’ Kaplan told the newspaper. ‘We have to weigh the various pros and cons and we’ll come to a decision in the next day or so, probably.’
Trump’s team previously said he planned to appeal Tuesday’s judgement. They filed the appeal hours after US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the case, filed a written ruling endorsing the verdict and ordering Trump to pay the full amount to Carroll.