After a jury convicted him guilty of sexually assaulting and defaming author E. Jean Carroll, the former president of the United States reportedly asked for a second trial, which a federal court denied on Wednesday.
The jury’s decision was neither fundamentally incorrect or a severe miscarriage of justice, according to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointment.
He rejected Trump’s claims that the $5 million in damages he was forced to pay was excessive and other claims.
The nine-member jury decided in May that Trump was guilty of violating Carroll, a longstanding advice columnist, in the middle of the 1990s at a department shop in New York City.
The jury also determined that he was accountable for subsequently defaming Carroll in a denial of her story in an October 2022 statement.
Later on Wednesday, the former president appealed the judge’s decision despite having rejected Carroll’s allegations. Trump also challenges the jury’s initial decision.
In a separate case against him that will go to trial in January, Carroll accuses him of defaming the author when she first came up with her account of him as president.
Trump requested a new trial, pointing out that although rape and sexual abuse are both types of sexual violence under New York law, they are defined differently.
The jury convicted Trump guilty of sexual abuse. Carroll has long referred to the episode as a rape, even after the jury’s decision.
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