Background: Former President Donald Trump is back in court on the rape / defamation case that started today with E. Jean Carroll in Federal Court in Manhattan. A small group of protesters against Trump showed up outside the courthouse. Andrea Renault/starmaxinc.com STAR MAX ©2024 via AP./ Inset: E. Jean Carroll arrives to federal court for her defamation of character trial against the former President Donald Trump on January 16,2024. The case is the second in less that a year brought by Carroll against Trump: this seek damages for comments made by the President during in and after he was in office. (Photo by John Lamparski/NurPhoto via AP)
In a single-page order, a federal appeals court on Tuesday denied Donald Trump‘s claims of presidential immunity in his case against E. Jean Carroll, spoiling his latest attempt to dismiss the first case brought against him by the writer just as the two go head-to-head in a second defamation trial in New York.
The ruling also dismisses outright Trump’s appeal of another court’s ruling that found Trump’s statements about Carroll were defamatory per se.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan found Trump liable for defamation already. A jury in a separate civil trial found last May that Trump sexually abused her in a dressing room in Manhattan in the 1990s and then defamed her after he left the White House. Carroll was awarded $5 million in damages.
The decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday upholds Kaplan’s previous ruling that so-called “presidential immunity” did not apply. Trump waived that argument, Kaplan found, when he brought it up three years too late.
Trump questioned whether it was waivable to start.
Carroll first sued Trump for defamation in November 2019 and Trump replied for the first time in January the next year. But his immunity argument was delayed until January 2023.
Trump is pressing similar though more extreme immunity arguments in Washington, D.C. where he faces a four-count criminal indictment alleging he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan found Trump was not immune from criminal prosecution and Trump appealed.
The appeals court heard arguments last month, including the claim from the former president’s legal team that he could murder his political rivals and evade criminal prosecution so long as he was not impeached and convicted by Congress for it first.
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