By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Donald Trump failed to persuade a federal appeals court to reconsider the $5 million verdict won by E. Jean Carroll after a jury found that the U.S. president sexually abused and defamed the former magazine columnist.
A divided 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan on Friday left intact its Dec. 30 decision upholding the jury award.
Carroll, now 81, accused Trump of attacking her around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan, and defaming her in an October 2022 Truth Social post by denying her claim as a hoax.
Jurors decided in May 2023 that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll, and defamed her by lying. They did not find that Trump raped Carroll, as she had claimed.
In seeking reconsideration, Trump maintained that the trial judge erred in letting jurors review the 2005 “Access Hollywood” video of him bragging about his sexual prowess, and a “pile-on” of inflammatory evidence that he mistreated two other women.
One, businesswoman Jessica Leeds, said Trump groped her on a plane in the late 1970s. The other, former People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff, said Trump forcibly kissed her at his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2005. Trump has denied their claims.
Trump, who turns 79 on Saturday, is separately appealing an $83.3 million jury verdict in January 2024 for defaming Carroll and damaging her reputation in June 2019, when he first denied her claim about the Bergdorf encounter.
The president is arguing in that appeal that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last July providing him substantial criminal immunity shields him from liability in Carroll’s civil case.
In his 2019 and 2022 denials of Carroll’s accusations, Trump said she was “not my type” and had made up the rape claim to promote her memoir.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York)
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