NEW YORK—Lawyers for former President Donald Trump argued in a Lower Manhattan courtroom on Friday morning, seeking to toss out a jury verdict that found that Trump liable of sexual abuse and defamation against writer E. Jean Carrol.
Trump attended the hearing, sitting by himself in a chair behind a row of lawyers in a courtroom of the federal appeals court. He did not attend the 2-week trial in the case last year, which resulted in a jury awarding Carroll $5 million after finding Trump sexually abused her.
Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer argued that in all the previous proceedings, Carroll’s lawyers failed to invoke any law that Trump had violated. The plaintiffs’ strategy, he said, was to rely on inflammatory evidence of questionable relevance, for example concerning the Access Hollywood recording in which Trump made sexually explicit remarks about women.
“They relentlessly hammered the propensity evidence, the Access Hollywood tape,” Sauer said.
“This case is a textbook example of implausible allegations being propped up by highly inflammatory, inadmissible” evidence, Sauer added.
Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said the evidence in question was proper. The attorney dwelt on the fact that Trump did not attend the defamation trial in person, and contended there was sufficient evidence backing Carroll’s claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room decades ago.
“E. Jean Carroll brought this case against him. Donald J. Trump assaulted her in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman in 1996, and then defamed her by saying she was crazy,” Kaplan said.
Appearing unconcerned about Sauer’s assertions that the plaintiffs wanted to inflame the jury with lurid accounts of alleged conduct by Trump, Kaplan doubled down on her portrayal of Trump as a predator who repeatedly tried to get women to lower their defenses by coming across as mild and friendly.
Kaplan called this modus operandi “pleasant chatting.”
“It was pleasant chatting, and then he would, from almost out of nowhere, pounce,” Kaplan said.
She also questioned the timeliness of Trump’s in-person appearance and the legal arguments his lawyers sought to make on his behalf.
“He was given every opportunity by Judge Kaplan to attend his trial,” she said.
The three-judge panel court is unlikely to issue a ruling before November’s presidential election.
After the hearing, Trump held a press conference at Trump Tower where he denied Carroll’s allegations and denounced what he said is broad abuse of the justice system in the various cases against him.
One of Trump’s attorneys, Will Scharf, spoke at the press conference and alleged that Carroll’s “story at its heart is an utterly implausible he said-she said story” and that there was “no corroboration for anything she has ever claimed about President Trump.”
In January, in a separate case, a jury awarded Carroll another $83.3 million in damages for comments Trump had made about her while he was president, finding that they were defamatory.
