President Trump has declared his intention to continue his efforts to overturn what he called on Monday “the Carroll hoax” after a federal appeals court denied his appeal to toss out one of two verdicts in the two separate civil lawsuits brought against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll. 

The appeals court’s decision upholds the $5 million judgment that held him liable for sexual abuse and defamation of Ms. Carroll. Trump’s other appeal, against the verdict which ordered him to pay another $83.3 million for defamation, has not been decided yet. 

In September, Trump challenged the $5 million civil verdict at the Second Circuit Federal Appeals Court, arguing that the trial judge at the New York district court, Lewis Kaplan, erred when he allowed evidence into the trial that prejudiced the jury against him. Trump has called Judge Kaplan “a Clinton appointed, highly partisan, Trump Hating Judge” on social media.   

But on Monday, a panel of judges ruled that, “The district court did not abuse its discretion in making any of the challenged evidentiary rulings.” The decision found that, “The jury made its assessment of the facts and claims on a properly developed record.”

Ms. Carroll, who is 81 years old and whose “Ask E. Jean” sex and romance column appeared in Elle magazine from 1993 through 2019, accused Trump of raping her inside a dressing room on the lingerie floor of Bergdorf Goodman, the upscale Manhattan department store, sometime in the 1990s (one of Ms. Carroll’s witnesses surmised the year was 1996), and of defaming her in 2022 when he called her a “wack job” and her allegations “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.” 

During the nine-day trial, which took place in May 2023, Ms. Carroll testified that she randomly ran into Trump at Bergdorf Goodman, where she was shopping, and that he asked her to help him pick out a gift for a female friend (in 1996, he was in the end stages of his second marriage, to Marla Maples). According to Ms. Carroll, they ended up on the lingerie floor of the department store, where he pulled her into a dressing room, closed the door and “raped” her.        

Ms. Carroll did not make her claim public until she included it in her book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.” In 2019, shortly before the book was published, New York magazine published an excerpt of the alleged encounter between Ms. Carroll and Trump. Ms. Carroll posed for the print cover wearing the dress she said she was wearing “23 years ago when Donald Trump attacked me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.”  

Trump denied the allegations and Ms. Carroll then sued him, twice. The first lawsuit alleged his statements defamed her and effectively ruined her career. The second lawsuit, which is the one the appeal’s court upheld on Monday, was filed in November 2022 after New York State amended its Adult Survivors Act. The new legislation permitted alleged victims of sexual offenses with expired statutes of limitations to file civil suits during a one-year period.

A jury of six men and three women did not find Trump guilty of the rape charge, but held him liable for sexual abuse and for defaming the writer,

by denying their encounter ever took place, effectively branding her as a liar. The jury awarded Ms. Carroll $5 million in combined damages for both the sexual abuse and the defamation. Trump has fiercely denied these allegations and repeatedly said, “I never met this woman in my life” and that she is not his “type.” A photo has surfaced of Trump at an NBC party in the 1980s, chatting with Ms. Carroll in a group of four that included their then-spouses (in this case, Trump’s first wife, Ivana), but Trump says he has met thousands of people in similar circumstances and has no memory of it.

He did not attend the trial but called the lawsuit a scam and Ms. Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, a prominent gay rights attorney, a “political operative.” He also said that the dress Ms. Carroll claimed to have worn during their department store encounter should have been “allowed to be part of the case.”

Leading the appeal for him was the attorney John Sauer, who represented Trump in the historic Trump v. United States case, which resulted in the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that former presidents are largely immune against prosecution for acts committed in service of their office. The President-elect recently picked Mr. Sauer to be the next U.S. solicitor general. 

Mr. Sauer argued to the federal judges that two witness testimonies, given by Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, two women who claimed Trump also sexually assaulted them, should not have been accepted as evidence. He described their testimony as “inflammatory” and “inadmissible” and the case as “a textbook example of implausible allegations.” 

Mr. Sauer demanded a new trial for his client, further criticizing that the Judge Kaplan (no relation to Roberta), allowed Ms. Carroll’s defense attorneys to play the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape to the jury. During the recording, which leaked shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Trump boasts to the show’s then-co-host, Billy Bush, in explicit terms, that women “allow” him to grope them because he’s a “star.” 

Ms. Carroll’s attorney, Ms. Kaplan, held that these testimonies proved an alleged pattern, where Trump would pleasantly talk with a woman and out of nowhere “pounce” on her.

On Monday, the Second Circuit, which is based in New York, used intimate, anatomical language to uphold the verdict. “With his shoulder and the whole weight of his body against her, Mr. Trump held her against the wall, kissed her, pulled down her tights, and stuck his fingers into her vagina — until Ms. Carroll managed to get a knee up and push him back off of her,” the panel of judges wrote in their ruling. 

“Both E. Jean Carroll and I are gratified by today’s decision,” Ms. Kaplan, said in a statement. “We thank the Second Circuit for its careful consideration of the parties’ arguments.”

Steven Cheung, Trump’s chief campaign spokesman, whom Trump has picked to be his White House communication’s director, fired back in his own statement on Monday. 

“The American People have re-elected President Trump with an overwhelming mandate, and they demand an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded Carroll Hoax, which will continue to be appealed,” Mr. Cheung wrote. “We look forward to uniting our country in the new administration as President Trump makes America great again.”  

Last week, Trump shared a post from another user on his social media platform Truth Social that read, “Should a woman go to jail for falsely accusing a man for rape?” The New York Times reported, adding that “the post encouraged others to share the post ‘if you want justice for Trump.’” 

Judge Kaplan had written in a post trial ruling that the jury’s verdict was tantamount, in common language, to rape. He described New York’s penal code as outdated in its definition of rape, finding that Ms. Carroll’s allegation that Trump had raped her was “substantially true.”

“The definition of rape in the New York Penal Law is far narrower than the meaning of ‘rape’ in common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere,” Judge Kaplan wrote in July 2023, concluding that the jury “implicitly found Mr. Trump did in fact digitally rape Ms. Carroll.” 

The 45th and soon to be 47th president cannot pardon himself in these cases, even though the suits were tried in federal court, because pardons issued by sitting presidents apply only to federal criminal offenses, not to private civil lawsuits. 

In the other lawsuit, which went to trial in January, Ms. Carroll alleged Trump’s initial statements, after the publication of her book excerpt in 2019, “shattered” her reputation, and incited death threats and harassment from Trump supporters which continue to this day. She also claims that as a result of Trump’s calumny, Elle “fired” her in 2020 when it canceled her longrunning sex and romance column.

“It would cost Carroll a national reputation, and Trump has a global audience,” her attorney Ms. Kaplan said during her closing argument. 

Ms. Kaplan referred to his statements as “brutal and immediate.” Trump threatened her client, she argued and cited him. “It’s a disgrace and people should pay dearly.” In another statement Trump said,  “People have to be careful because they are playing a very dangerous game.” 

The trial sought to determine if Trump’s June 2019 responses and his ongoing social media insults damaged Ms. Carroll’s reputation, and continued to cause her significant harm. Trump testified and attended the proceedings, causing a ruckus, when he abruptly got up and left the courtroom during Ms. Kaplan’s closing argument.   

During the January trial Judge Kaplan did not allow Trump to deny Ms. Carroll’s sexual assault allegations, saying they were settled fact due to the jury verdict in the May trial. He ordered the parties to solely focus on the issue of defamation, with the assumption that Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll. This enraged Trump.

Although Ms. Kaplan ‘only’ suggested $24 million for reputational repair and emotional distress, leaving an open amount for punitive damages, the jury awarded Ms. Carroll a judgment in the amount of $83.3 million. 

Trump has also appealed that verdict.