A federal appeals court in Manhattan declined to throw out an $83 million defamation judgment against President Donald Trump on Monday.
The 2024 judgment found that Trump defamed writer E. Jean Carroll while denying her allegations of rape. In 2019, the president said Carroll’s claims were “totally false” and made to promote her book. In 2023, Trump was found to be liable for sexually assaulting Carroll in a department store decades earlier. Carroll has won two defamation judgments against Trump for his repeated denials of the allegations.
The panel of judges for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that the 2024 ruling against Trump was “fair and reasonable.” The ruling went on to call out Trump’s defamatory comments following the 2023 sexual assault case, saying that “the degree of reprehensibility of Mr. Trump’s conduct was remarkably high, perhaps unprecedented.”
“Carroll was subjected to ongoing and prolific harassment as a result of these statements, including a multitude of death threats and other threats of physical injury,” the ruling read. “For nearly five years, Trump never wavered or relented in his public attacks on Carroll.”
Roberta Kaplan, attorney for Carroll, said the ruling was proof that her client “was telling the truth” about Trump’s sexual assault.
“Earlier today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed, in a comprehensive 70-page ruling, that E. Jean Carroll was telling the truth, and that President Donald Trump was not,” Kaplan said in a statement shared with Salon.
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“We look forward to an end of the appellate process so that justice will finally be done,” she said.
Lawyers for the president argued that he was exempt from liability due to a 2024 Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity. The decision by the Supreme Court said that Trump could not be prosecuted for some official acts during his first term. However, the Second District found that “Trump has failed to identify any grounds that would warrant” presidential immunity being a factor in the case.
