President Trump attended the hearing in a federal appeals court at New York on Friday, where his attorneys were fighting the adverse verdict and $5 million judgment imposed on him for the alleged sexual abuse and defamation of the columnist and writer E. Jean Carroll. 

Trump and his motorcade arrived at the Lower Manhattan courthouse and entered the Second Circuit Federal Appeals court shortly before 10 a.m. The hearing lasted roughly 25 minutes, giving both parties about ten minutes each to present their arguments. 

The former president, 78, and his accuser, Ms. Carroll, 80, whose “Ask E. Jean” sex and romance column appeared in Elle magazine from 1993 through 2019, sat about 15 feet apart inside a courtroom at the iconic Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse. Trump and Ms. Carroll did not look at each other. But Trump shook his head at times, especially when Ms. Carroll’s attorney alleged he had sexually assaulted her many years ago.

Arguing the appeal for Trump was his attorney John Sauer, who served as Solicitor General of Missouri from 2017 to 2023 and 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. 

On Friday, Mr. Sauer attempted to convince a skeptical panel of three federal judges that two witness testimonies heard during the trial in May should not have been accepted as evidence, describing their testimony as “inflammatory” and “inadmissible” and the case as “a textbook example of implausible allegations.” When he was advised by the judges not to rush his arguments and speak more slowly, he told the panel that he was “passionate about this case.”  

Mr. Sauer fiercely criticized the trial judge for permitting the jury to allow the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape into evidence. 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.” Mr. Sauer further criticized the judge for permitting testimony by Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, two women who said Trump had also sexually assaulted them.  

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

In May 2023, a civil jury trial was held to examine Ms. Carroll’s allegation that Trump raped her inside a dressing room on the lingerie floor at Bergdorf Goodman, the upscale Manhattan department store, sometime in the 1990s (one of Ms. Carroll’s witnesses surmised the year was 1996), and defamed her in 2022 by calling her allegations a “total con job.”

Ms. Carroll details her claim in her memoir “What Do We Need Men For”. 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 says she was wearing “23 years ago when Donald Trump attacked me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.”

The jury found that Mr. Trump sexually assaulted Ms. Carroll, and that he defamed her in October 2022 by denying their encounter ever took place, effectively branding the journalist as a liar. The jury awarded her $5 million in combined damages for both the sexual assault and the defamation. 

It has been the subject of some dispute if the term “rape” can be used instead of “sexual assault” when describing what the jury found Trump liable for. The 45th president is suing the George Stephanopoulos and ABC after Mr. Stephanopoulos said on television that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape.” In July, a Miami judge denied ABC’s motion to dismiss the defamation lawsuit and it’s now entered the discovery phase. 

The district court judge, who presided over the New York cases, Lewis Kaplan ruled in July that the jury’s verdict was tantamount, in common language, to rape. While the jury disbelieved Ms. Carroll’s claim that Trump penetrated her with his penis, it believed her additional claim that he forced his fingers inside her against her will. Judge Kaplan ruled that under New York law “rape” can only be committed with genitals.

On the day of the verdict, Trump appeared on Kaitlan Collins’s town hall on CNN and denied that he ever assaulted or even knew Ms. Carroll, calling her a “whack job” and claiming, “I don’t know who the hell she is.” The former president reiterated these claims during his press conference at Trump Tower on Friday. 

“She made up a story and fabricated,” Trump said. “I would have had no interest in meeting her in any way, shape, or form. It didn’t happen, and she would not have been the chosen one.”

Trump called the verdict “ridiculous”, and said the case was brought against him by “a woman I have never met. I have no idea who she is.” He added, “she wrote a book and she made a ridiculous story up. She put it in her book and we’re now appealing the decision.”  

There is, however, a photograph of Trump and Ms. Carroll together on line for an event in the late 1980s. Trump was shown this photograph during his deposition in 2022 and famously mistook Ms. Carroll for his ex-wife, Marla Maples. 

The black and white picture portrays a laughing Ms. Carroll, next to her then-husband John Johnson. Ms. Carroll is turned towards Trump, who is accompanied by his first wife, Ivana Trump. 

“They have a picture from, they say, about 40 years ago, a picture,” Trump said during his press conference on Friday. “And the picture depicts her and her husband on a celebrity line where I was the celebrity. I was — been a celebrity for a long time. And they were shaking my hands along with hundreds of other people. Nobody even knows where it is.”

The Washington Post reported on Friday that the picture was included in the 2019 New York magazine article, “and that the caption described the image as showing ‘Carroll, Donald and Ivana Trump, and Carroll’s then-husband, television-news anchor John Johnson, at an NBC party around 1987.’” 

On Friday, Mr. Trump said that Ms. Carroll had said “very bad things” about her husband and that he gathered they were “now divorced” (they are). Also during his press event at Trump Tower on Friday, Trump referred to Judge Kaplan in various unflattering terms, and accused Ms. Carroll’s legal team and Judge Kaplan of coordinating with the Biden Justice Department. He criticized Ms. Kaplan, no relation to Judge Kaplan, for comments she made in which she advocated a strategy of undermining him by targeting him with multiple distracting lawsuits and criminal indictments.

The civil case, which is being litigated in the federal court system, is not to be confused with another defamation lawsuit Ms. Carroll waged against Trump, which was tried in front of the same judge last January. The jury in that case awarded Ms. Carroll a staggering $83 million dollar judgment. Trump, who was barred by Judge Kaplan from denying Ms. Carroll’s assault allegations during the trial, after the judge ruled they had been settled as fact in the previous trial, is also appealing that verdict.      

On Friday, Mr. Sauer criticized Judge Kaplan’s decision to allow the two other women, who alleged Trump also sexually assaulted them, to testify. One of the women, Ms. Stoynoff, told the jury Trump had pushed her against a wall and forcibly kissed when she went to Mar-a-Lago to interview Trump and his wife Melania for a first-wedding-anniversary feature story for People’s magazine in 2005. The other woman, Ms. Leeds, said Trump assaulted her, when they sat next to each other on a plane in the early 1980s. She said he suddenly grabbed her breasts, tried to kiss her, and reached up her skirt in a “tussling match.” 

On Friday, Trump complimented Ms. Stoynoff’s People magazine piece,  which he said was a poignant account of his and Melania Trump’s love story, and denied assaulting her or Ms. Leeds.

Ms. Carroll’s attorney, Ms. Kaplan,  argued that these testimonies showed Trump “engaged in a pattern of abruptly lunging at a woman in a semi-public place, pressing his body against her, kissing her, and sexually touching her without consent, and later categorically denying the allegations.”

The hearing on Friday mostly focused on the airplane sexual assault allegation by Ms. Leeds. She told the New York Times in 2016, weeks before the election, that Trump was “like an octopus. His hands were everywhere.” Trump denied the claim during his Friday press conference, saying it was absurd that someone as “famous” as he was at the time would molest someone sitting next to him on an airplane. 

“The story has followed me for years,” Trump said, adding that there were, “no police reports, no witnesses, no corroboration of any kind, no criminal suggestions, no nothing.” 

In court, Mr. Sauer argued that there was no law barring the alleged conduct on a plane at the time of the incident, and therefore the testimony should not have been presented to the jury.  

One of the judges on the panel, Susan Carney, seemed skeptical, reminding Trump’s attorney that Congress had passed statutes which allowed evidence regarding serious conduct.

“I’m not sure how the jurisdictional element, the precise jurisdictional element, whether in an airplane, in the specific maritime jurisdiction, or what have what have you, impacts the conduct that Congress was willing to let juries consider in adjudicating these kinds of cases,” Judge Carney argued.

Mr. Sauer pushed back saying that Congress’ own statutory language specified “prohibited” conduct, but that it did not include a sexual abuse nor assault in airspace.

But Ms. Kaplan cited a separate statute under which a sexual assault on a plane would have been considered a crime.  

Judge Denny Chin asked Ms. Kaplan, if the plane incident was sufficiently similar to the alleged encounter between Trump and Ms. Carroll inside the dressing room, to be considered as evidence. 

“The fact pattern is different from the other incidents, which were in much more private places,” Judge Chin said.

Ms. Kaplan agreed that Trump hadn’t led the witness onto the airplane, the way he allegedly led Ms. Carroll into the dressing room, but she argued that the pattern of forcing himself onto women “is exactly the same.” 

“He had a pattern of having kind of pleasant chatting with a woman,” Ms. Kaplan said. “And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he would, for lack of better term, your honors, pounce.”  

Yet Trump’s attorneys also raised concerns in regards to the “Access Hollywood” tape, while Ms. Kaplan disagreed, saying the recording was a kind of “confession” by Trump. 

Ms. Kaplan noted that Trump chose not to testify during the first trial, more so, he didn’t even attend hearings. Trump was advised not to come to court by his attorneys. He has repeatedly regretted that decision, and did attend the hearings during the Carroll trial in January, where he also testified but was barred by Judge Kaplan from disputing her assault allegations, because they had been legally established as fact by the prior verdict.    

During his press conference on Friday, Trump first gently disparaged his legal team, saying, “I am disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you.” Though he pulled back the statement shortly afterwards, “They’re good, they’re good people, talented people,” he added. 

It is uncertain when the judges of the Second Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals would render their decision. Legal experts have said a verdict before the election is highly unlikely.