Former US president Donald Trump filed a notice on Thursday to appeal the verdict in the civil rape and defamation case brought forward by columnist E Jean Carroll, multiple outlets reported.
Carroll sued Trump for battery and defamation, saying he had raped her in a luxury department store dressing room in the 1990s. She first went public about the allegations in 2019.
The lawsuit went to trial, and several people testified, including another woman who has publicly accused Trump of sexual assault. On Tuesday, after three hours of deliberation, the Manhattan federal jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse — but not rape — and ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million in damages — a decision Trump is now asking the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals to toss.
Trump blasted the verdict earlier this week, calling it a “disgrace” and “a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time” on his social media platform Truth Social.
Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina confirmed Trump’s decision to file an appeal following news of the verdict. He said he believed an appeal could move forward because the jury “rejected the rape claim and they always claimed this was a rape case”, which he described as “a little perplexing”, Politico reported.
But members of Carroll’s legal team said they’re confident that Trump has “no legitimate arguments” for an appeal.
“I’ve rarely felt more confident about an appeal than I do about this one,” Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said on Wednesday while on NBC’s Today.
Trump was absent from the entire trial and didn’t provide testimony. The former president has repeatedly denied Carroll’s account and has insulted her multiple times since she came forward. He called Carroll a liar, claimed he wouldn’t have assaulted her because she wasn’t his “type” and called her testimony a “SCAM!” on Truth Social.
Trump’s digs at Carroll continued through Wednesday, a day before he filed the notice of appeal, when he called her “a whack job” before a crowd at a live CNN town hall event.
Carroll’s lawyer told The New York Times on Thursday that her client is considering suing Trump for a third time in light of his defamatory remarks about her on CNN, but said no decision has been made yet.
“Everything’s on the table, obviously, and we have to give serious consideration to it,” Kaplan told the Times. “We have to weigh the various pros and cons, and we’ll come to a decision in the next day or so, probably.”