MANHATTAN (CN) — Former President Donald Trump didn’t attend a single day of the 2023 trial where jurors found him liable for sexually assaulting columnist and writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room some three decades prior. But on Friday, he appeared at an appeals hearing in New York City while his attorneys urged a panel of judges to throw out the verdict.
Wearing his signature blue suit and long red tie, Trump sat a long table behind his defense attorneys. Upon entering the 17th floor courtroom, the current Republican presidential nominee greeted courtroom sketch artist Jane Rosenberg — a familiar face from his criminal trial down the street earlier this year.
Trump, who did attend portions of a related 2024 civil trial next door in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan federal court building, quietly watched oral arguments while seated alongside campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn and lawyer-turned-spokeswoman Alina Habba.
Representing Trump before the Second Circuit of Appeals was attorney D. John Sauer, the former Missouri solicitor general who also represented him in the recent Supreme Court case that provided Trump with broad presidential immunity, throwing off his pending election subversion case.
On appeal, Trump argues that the jury verdict should be vacated because Carroll’s attorneys relied on a “textbook example” of inadmissible evidence at trial by calling in Trump’s alleged prior bad acts to show a pattern of his sexually assaulting women and then later defaming them after they came forward with accusations against him.
Sauer referred to Carroll’s accusations against Trump as “a quintessential he-said, she-said case” and requested that the former president get a new trial against Carroll.
U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin quickly interjected and emphasized Trump’s uphill burden against the Second Circuit’s “great deference to the district court.”
“It’s very hard to overturn a jury verdict based on evidentiary rulings,” the Barack Obama appointee said. “So why should we order a new trial here?”
Sauer replied that the Carroll’s attorneys improperly played the notorious “Access Hollywood” tape from 2005 in which Trump joked about women letting him sexually assault them because he is “a star.”
Sauer’s voice strained with a dry scratchiness throughout Friday’s arguments, and was compounded by speaking so fast that Judge Denny Chin at one point advised him to “slow down a touch.”
Carroll’s trial attorney Roberta Kaplan argued that the court had properly introduced evidence of sexual assault that was both a crime at the time of the conduct and at the time of the trial. She defended the admission of the Access Hollywood evidence by arguing it was not “propensity evidence,” but “better classified as a confession” of his modus operandi.
“I grab women by the pussy,” Kaplan said, paraphrasing the hot mic recording of Trump relishing to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush that was leaked one month before Trump first won office in 2016.
Trump also objects to trial testimony from Jessica Leeds, who told jurors Trump grabbed her chest and ran his hand up her skirt as they sat side-by-side in first class on a New York City-bound jet in 1979 or 1980.
Sauer argued that Leeds’s testimony was improperly admitted by the lower court by misinterpreting the term “sexual assault” to cover Leeds’s story because “airspace” is not covered in the jurisdiction for evidence of similar crimes in sexual assault cases.
Kaplan responded that there was no jurisdictional flaw to using Leeds’s story as evidence.”It was a crime then to grope someone on a plane; it was a crime now to grope someone on an airplane.”
Chin was joined on the panel by fellow Obama-appointed U.S. Circuit Judge Susan Carney and U.S. Circuit Judge Myrna Pérez, a Joe Biden appointee.
The panel did not immediately rule on Trump’s appeal Friday morning.
Trump repeated his denial of having ever met Carroll during a press conference at his namesake Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan following the hearing.
“I have no idea who this woman is,” he said. “This is a disgraceful case.”
Trump also refuted having assaulted Leeds — and predicted that she too would sue him for defamation.
Carroll sued Donald Trump for battery and defamation, alleging he raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store fitting room in 1996.
She testified Trump had asked her to help him pick out a gift for a woman at the Manhattan department store in 1996, and the two made their way toward the store’s lingerie department, which was empty in the evening hours. After Trump tossed her a lacy bodysuit and asked her to try it on, she tossed it back, telling Trump it was his color. Trump then pushed her against the wall, pressed his mouth on hers, and raped her as she struggled to get away, Carroll said.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan denied Trump’s bid to exclude “Access Hollywood” tape from being part of Carroll’s trial.
“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’ve a star they let you do it,” Trump says in the tape as Bush laughs along. “You can do anything,” he continues. “Grab them by the pussy.”
As the tape circulated widely leading up to the 2016 election, Trump dismissed his words as “locker room talk.”
While Trump was found liable for sexual battery, Judge Kaplan later concluded in a subsequent opinion that “Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.'”
Earlier this year, disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein successfully overturned his landmark #MeToo conviction based on similar issues regarding the admission of evidence pertaining to prior bad acts to illustrate a pattern of sexual predation.
Weinstein’s case was tried in state court, which has different standards for admissibility of evidence than federal court, where Carroll ultimately litigated her two cases against Trump.