Lola Fadulu at NYT:
President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday failed to overturn a $5 million judgment that he sexually abused the writer E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and later defamed her.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers argued to a federal appeals panel that a lower court in Manhattan had erred by allowing two women to testify in the Carroll trial that he had also sexually assaulted them. The lawyers also argued that the court should not have allowed Ms. Carroll’s lawyers to play the recording of the “Access Hollywood” conversation in which Mr. Trump bragged in vulgar terms about grabbing women by the genitals.
The appeals court rejected Mr. Trump’s request for a new trial in the case, which produced the smaller of two defamation judgments against him. “Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings,” the opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said. It was unsigned but issued by a three-judge panel made up of Denny Chin and Susan Carney — appointed by President Barack Obama — as well as Myrna Pérez, appointed by President Biden.
“Both E. Jean Carroll and I are gratified by today’s decision,” Roberta Kaplan, Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, said in a statement. “We thank the Second Circuit for its careful consideration of the parties’ arguments.”
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca2.60504/gov.uscourts.ca2.60504.176.1.pdf
The jury's unanimous verdict in Carroll II was almost entirely in favor of Ms. Carroll. The only point on which Ms. Carroll did not prevail was whether she had proved that Mr. Trump had “raped” her within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law – a section that provides that the label “rape” as used in criminal prosecutions in New York applies only to vaginal penetration by a penis. Forcible, unconsented-to penetration of the vagina or of other bodily orifices by fingers, other body parts, or other articles or materials is not called “rape” under the New York Penal Law. It instead is labeled “sexual abuse.”1
As is shown in the following notes, the definition of rape in the New York Penal Law is far narrower than the meaning of “rape” in common modern parlance, its definition in some dictionaries,2 in some federal and state criminal statutes,3 and elsewhere.4 The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was “raped” within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump “raped” her as many people commonly understand the word “rape.” Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.
So why does this matter? It matters because Mr. Trump now contends that the jury's $2 million compensatory damages award for Ms. Carroll's sexual assault claim was excessive because the jury concluded that he had not “raped” Ms. Carroll.5 Its verdict, he says, could have been based upon no more than “groping of [Ms. Carroll's] breasts through clothing or similar conduct, which is a far cry from rape.”6 And while Mr. Trump is right that a $2 million award for such groping alone could well be regarded as excessive, that undermines rather than supports his argument. His argument is entirely unpersuasive.
