Trump attorneys Alina Habba and Will Scharf look on as their client expresses his disappointment on Sept. 6, 2024 (C-SPAN).
After much anticipated oral arguments on Friday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where Donald Trump asked for a new trial in E. Jean Carroll’s case, a civil lawsuit in which a jury last year found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, the former president held a press conference and expressed disappointment in his lawyers, as they stood behind him, and said his “legal talent” simply has not been able to “overcome rigged judges” and liberal juries.
Trump appeared in Manhattan to attend court and looked on as his appellate attorney D. John Sauer made the case that Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan “erred” in rulings on evidence he allowed and didn’t allow, meaning there should be a new trial in the case known as Carroll II.
In that case, a jury in May 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the 1990s and for defaming her when denying the allegations decades later while president, leading to a $5 million award in damages (and $83 million more in a second defamation lawsuit known as Carroll I).
The Trump team has argued that the jury verdict was “unjust and erroneous” and based on “flawed and prejudicial evidentiary rulings” that permitted two “lifelong friends” to testify on their “vague recollections” of Carroll telling them about the 1990s Bergdorf Goodman incident, allowed in testimony of Trump accusers Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, and allowed in the infamous Access Hollywood recording and “grab ’em” remarks he apologized for but downplayed as “locker room talk” before the 2016 election.
In court on Friday morning, Sauer argued before a panel of U.S. circuit judges each appointed by Democratic presidents that Carroll’s case is a “quintessential he-said she-said” situation where, decades after the alleged incident and after Trump was president, the plaintiff accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a dressing room of department store Bergdorf Goodman in New York City and found a way to inject “highly inflammatory, inadmissible evidence” and “prejudicial, and untested allegations of prior bad acts” into the trial to convince the jury of a “pattern” of misconduct and guarantee a liability finding.
According to Law&Crime’s own coverage of the proceeding, at least one judge on the panel stated that the Trump team had a steep hill to climb in order to overturn the verdict. Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin, for instance, called it “very hard to overturn a jury verdict based on evidentiary rulings.”
Carroll lawyer Roberta Kaplan shot back that she can “lose all the propensity evidence and it would still be harmless error,” so Trump’s appeal should be rejected.
Kaplan also defended the inclusion of the Access Hollywood recording in the case, claiming that Trump “embraced” it during his deposition, in which he confused Carroll, in a decades-old photo of them meeting, for his ex-wife Marla Maples.
A photograph of Donald Trump, Ivana Trump, and E. Jean Carroll at a party (court documents).
“He did not put on a single witness in the civil case,” Kaplan said. “We put on 11. But what we did put in is his — this videotape of ‘Access Hollywood’ where he basically says, ‘I grab women by the p—,’ excuse my language, without their consent. And then at his deposition that I took and asked him about that video, what did he say? He embraced it!”
After the arguments ended, Trump spoke at a press conference, where two his more public-facing attorneys, Alina Habba and Will Scharf, were standing in the background as he blamed legal losses in New York on “rigged judges” and shortcomings of his “legal talent” in the face of what he described as a stacked deck.
Trump, with his lawyers flanking him, says “I’m disappointed in my legal talent, to be honest with you” pic.twitter.com/xymV4nWl55
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 6, 2024
“And, I feel sad that I have to come up here and explain it. I have all this legal talent, but legal talent cannot overcome rigged judges,” he said. “They can’t overcome a four-percent Republican area. And I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you.”
“They’re good. They’re good people. They’re talented people,” he said, appearing to describe Friday’s proceedings as a “trial,” when it was instead an appeal of a trial verdict he lost. “Today at the trial they didn’t mention the dress […] the Monica Lewinsky-type dress.”
“[I] never touched this woman, saw this woman, knew — had no idea who she was,” Trump said of the longtime Elle Magazine columnist.
When it was Habba’s turn to speak in her capacity as a Trump campaign senior adviser, she addressed American women and backed Trump’s claims of rigged judges and prosecutors.
“I have sat with President Trump for years now while he was been targeted with lies, and with judges, AGs, and DAs who have specifically run in this city on getting Trump,” she said. “The Trump administration will fix this problem. We will stop Kamala Harris’ regime — because she was there, let’s not forget that, and she still is — of using officials from the White House, putting them in DAs’ offices, in AGs’ office and attacking your political opponent, and your country deserves better than this.”
Scharf, for his part, blasted Carroll’s case as “insane” and an “absolute abuse of our legal system.”
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