E. Jean Carroll reacts as she leaves Manhattan federal court following the verdict in the civil rape case against former President Donald Trump on May 9, 2023 in New York City.
Brendan McDiarmid | Reuters
federal government court of appeals On Wednesday, he rejected Donald Trump’s bid to delay a defamation lawsuit filed by author E. Jean Carroll, but granted an early appeal on the question of whether the president can claim absolute immunity as a defense. .
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals’ order comes after a series of significant losses for Trump in two lawsuits he filed against Carroll related to allegations that he raped her in a New York department store in the mid-1990s. This means that he has won a partial victory.
Unless further action is taken by the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court, Carroll’s second lawsuit remains scheduled to be heard in mid-January in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
But in an order Wednesday, the Second Circuit consolidated Trump’s two pending appeals and gave Trump’s lawyers and Carroll’s lawyers the next 35 days to file legal briefs on the dispute. I ordered him to do it.
The court stated that “appeals will be assigned to the first available panel to hear the case on its merits.”
This means a panel of three appellate judges could hear arguments by mid-October and issue a decision before the trial begins.
The order comes after a federal district judge ruled that Trump was civilly liable for defamatory comments he made about Carroll in 2019 when he first went public with allegations that she had raped him. It came out a week after I defeated him. The ruling means that future trials will only address the question of how much President Trump should pay Carroll in monetary damages.
“We look forward to both the January 15 damages trial and the Second Circuit’s claim that Donald Trump has waived executive privilege,” Robbie Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, said in a statement. “There is,” he said.
In court filings, Mr. Kaplan ridiculed Mr. Trump’s appeals of two adverse rulings by the judges in the case, bringing up the president’s claim of absolute immunity late in the case as the trial approached, and He criticized the president’s legal maneuvering. He continued to lose in court decisions.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.
A jury in Manhattan federal court found in May that Carroll sexually assaulted her during an encounter at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s, defamed her in a previous statement denying her allegations, and that the other A judgment was awarded to Carroll in the amount of $5 million in damages. autumn.
Trump has denied sexually assaulting Carroll and is appealing the ruling.
In a pending lawsuit headed for trial, Carroll alleges that Trump defamed her in 2019 when he became the president’s first president to deny her rape claims. The case was delayed for years by legal proceedings that included efforts by the Justice Department to effectively invalidate Carroll’s claims by arguing that Trump was immune from lawsuits because he was president at the time.
In July, the Justice Department cited a ruling by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., that suggested Trump could be prosecuted personally if his comments were not intended to serve the U.S. government. was withdrawn.
The Justice Department also noted that Trump’s disparaging comments about Carroll continued even after she left the White House in January 2021..