A federal appeals court has ruled that former President Donald Trump gave up his right to argue that presidential immunity protects him. This pertains to statements he made in 2019 when he denied raping advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
A three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld a lower court’s ruling. This ruling states that Trump had effectively waived the immunity defense by not raising it when Carroll first filed a defamation lawsuit against him four years ago.
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Alina Habba, a lawyer for Trump, said in an emailed statement that the ruling was “fundamentally flawed.” She also mentioned that the former president’s legal team would be immediately appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, said the ruling allows the case to move forward with a trial next month.
Carroll’s lawsuit seeks over $10 million in damages from Trump for his comments in 2019. This is the year Carroll said in a memoir that the Republican had sexually abused her in the dressing room of a Manhattan luxury department store in 1996. Trump has adamantly denied ever encountering Carroll in the store or even knowing her.
Trump, who is running for president again next year, is also attempting to use the presidential immunity argument. This is as he faces charges he plotted to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
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In Carroll’s lawsuit, his lawyers argued that the lower-court judge erred in rejecting the immunity defense when it was raised three years after Carroll sued Trump.
In a written decision Wednesday, the appeals court panel sided with U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. In August, he declared that the defense was forfeited because lawyers waited too long to assert it
“First, Defendant unduly delayed in raising presidential immunity as a defense,” the appeals court argued in its ruling. “Three years passed between Defendant’s answer and his request for leave to amend his answer. A three-year delay is more than enough, under our precedents, to qualify as ‘undue.'”
The appeals court expedited the issue ahead of the January trial, which focuses on determining the damages to be awarded to Carroll.
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This past spring, a jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll but rejected her claim that he raped her. It awarded Carroll $5 million for sexual abuse and defamation for comments Trump made about her last year.
The verdict left the original and long-delayed defamation lawsuit she brought in 2019 to be decided. Kaplan also ruled that the jury’s findings earlier this year applied to the 2019 lawsuit.
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