Donald Trump has lost his bid to overturn a jury verdict that he sexually abused former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll.
The federal appeals court ruling comes just a day after the president-elect hinted that he would seek retribution on Carroll for suing him over an alleged incident in a dressing room at Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman department store around 1996.
Trump reposted a photograph of the writer on his Truth Social account with the sentence: “Should a woman go to jail for falsely accusing a man of rape? Retruth if you want justice for Trump.”
Trump has also hinted that he will take action against others who have crossed him, including Liz Cheney and President Joe Biden.
However, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found Sunday that “Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings” and “has not carried his burden to show that any claimed error or combination of claimed errors affected his substantial rights as required to warrant a new trial,” according to ABC News.
The jury in the May 2023 civil case awarded Carroll $5 million in damages after finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and for making defamatory remarks about the former Elle magazine columnist in 2022.
Trump’s lawyers argued the judge should not have allowed two women, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, to testify about sexual assaults allegedly involving Trump. They also claimed the case should not have included the infamous Access Hollywood tape in which he was heard talking inappropriately about women.
The appeal court judges ruled the evidence given by the two women showed “a repeated, idiosyncratic pattern of conduct.”
They added that the tape was admissible “as evidence of a pattern” of behavior.
“Both E. Jean Carroll and I are gratified by today’s decision,” Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said of the appeals court decision.
In a second trial verdict in January—which Trump is also appealing—a jury awarded Carroll $83 million in damages over his 2019 denials of her accusations.
Trump has repeatedly denied all the allegations, insisting that Carroll was “not my type” and that he’d never even met her.
