Former US President Donald Trump has filed an appeal after a New York jury held him guilty for sexually abusing and defaming a writer, who has stated that she may sue him for the third time.
On Thursday afternoon, May 11, Trump’s lawyers filed a notice of appeal in the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, less than 48 hours after a Manhattan jury awarded columnist E Jean Carroll $5 million.
Carroll said in the mid-1990s that Trump assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in New York.
On Tuesday, jurors found Trump guilty, ordering him to pay Carroll almost $2 million in civil violence damages and nearly $3 million for successfully showing that he defamed her by labelling her case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.”
Trump’s lawyers filed the appeal on the same day Carroll announced she could sue Trump a third time after he made insulting remarks about her during a CNN town hall on Wednesday night.
In the televised town hall, the ex-president labelled Carroll a “whack job” and said the case was “rigged.”
‘What type of woman meets someone and brings them up, and then you’re playing hanky-panky in a locker room?’ Trump said this while some of his followers in the audience laughed.
Carroll said she was asleep when Trump slammed her on TV, but her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, handed her a transcript of his statements. She stated that she stopped reading after the first paragraph.
‘It’s just foolish, it’s filthy, vile, foul, and it scars people,’ Carroll said to The New York Times on Thursday.
Kaplan stated that they had not decided whether to pursue a new defamation complaint. In addition to the rape and defamation lawsuit that ended in Carroll’s favour, the writer has a pending defamation case against Trump.
‘Obviously, everything is on the table, and we have to give it serious thought,’ Kaplan told the publication. ‘We need to examine the many pros and downsides, and we’ll probably make a decision in the next day or so.’
