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Donald Trump actually showed up this time.
The 2024 Republican presidential candidate appeared in a Manhattan federal appeals court Friday to watch the oral arguments in the appeal of a jury verdict finding him liable for sexual abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll.
Much of the arguments — on the 17th floor of a Manhattan federal courthouse — focused on whether sexual assault testimony from one witness in the trial should have been tossed because the incident she alleges took place on an airplane.
John Sauer, Trump's lawyer in the Friday arguments, said the jury should have never heard evidence from Jessica Leeds, who testified that Trump groped her on a plane in the 1970s.
When Trump ran into Leeds a couple of years later, he recalled her as "that cunt from the airplane," Leeds testified.
Leeds's allegations weren't part of Carroll's accusations, but the trial judge allowed her testimony because they demonstrated what Carroll's lawyers argued was a pattern of behavior by Trump.
But Sauer said the testimony should have been "inadmissible" because the alleged events were under "territorial or maritime jurisdiction" and different rules of evidence applied.
The three judges on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals panel hearing the case seemed largely skeptical of the arguments.
US Circuit Judge Denny Chin appeared doubtful it would make sense to "order a new trial" based on the arguments.
"It's very hard to overturn a jury verdict for evidentiary grounds," he said.
Carroll's lawyer Roberta Kaplan said there was no "special aircraft jurisdiction" that would have led to the exclusion of Leeds's testimony.
"It was a crime to grope someone on a plane," she said. "It is a crime to grope someone on a plane."
Trump skipped the trial for the case, which took place in the spring of 2023. The jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll and ordered him to pay $5 million in damages.
After suffering the court loss, Trump did attend nearly all of a second trial, in January of this year, which focused on additional defamation damages.
His lead attorney in the January trial, Alina Habba, frequently sparred with the case's judge. Trump himself stood up and walked out of the courtroom in the middle of closing arguments from Carroll's lawyer Roberta Kaplan.
The jury in the second trial ordered the former president to pay Carroll another $83 million in damages for repeatedly calling her a liar and disparaging her appearance while denying the sexual assault.
Carroll attended every day of both trials, as well as Friday's arguments. Kaplan declined to comment after the hearing.
The appeal's oral arguments were held in a courthouse across the street from where the two Carroll v. Trump trials took place.
Trump brought much of his expansive legal team with him Friday. In addition to Sauer, who made the oral arguments, he had attorneys Todd Blanche, Emil Bove, and Habba in tow. Two advisors, Boris Epshteyn and Joshua Katz, hung back at the same large table in the courtroom well.
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Carroll brought her sexual abuse lawsuit against Trump using the Adult Survivor's Act, a New York law passed in the wake of the #MeToo movement that opened a window allowing for civil sexual misconduct claims that would otherwise be barred by the statute of limitations.
Carroll alleged that, in the mid-1990s, Trump cornered her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman's dressing room in Manhattan, a short walk from Trump Tower. In harrowing testimony for both trials, she described how his "curved finger" penetrated her without her consent. Two of Carroll's friends testified she told her about the incident shortly after it took place.
Trump's lawyers have argued the verdict in the first trial should be tossed. In an appeal brief, lawyers Blanche and Bove — who also represent Trump in a slew of other cases — borrowed arguments from Harvey Weinstein's successful appeal in his New York criminal case, who also argued accusers not part of the case shouldn't have been allowed to testify.
Sauer argued Trump's case was "a textbook example" of a case wrongly propped up by propensity evidence rather than Trump's actual conduct.
"It's a quintessential he-said-she-said case," he said.
The judges didn't appear to be convinced. US Circuit Court Judge Susan Carney mused about whether the verdict could stand when considering the "outcry witnesses" to who Carroll disclosed her story.
Legal experts — including Weinstein's own lawyers — previously told BI the argument has a slim chance of success. Federal courtroom rules are more lenient when it comes to the testimony of "propensity witnesses" who help establish a pattern of behavior, particularly when it comes to civil cases.
"In these civil cases, you can certainly show a pattern, and that's basically what's happening, especially when you have a perpetrator with multiple alleged victims," Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania professor who helped write the Adult Survivors Act, told BI before Friday's arguments.
On Friday, Kaplan emphasized that the ordinary rules were followed during the trial
"Despite the prominence of this case, and the personalities involved, this is really about a routine application of federal rules of evidence," she said.
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She also jabbed at Habba's earlier claims that she may have some kind of conflict of interest with the trial judge, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan.
"Just for the record, we are not related and he is not my mentor," she said.
Trump is racing to clear away many of his legal problems ahead of the November presidential election, where is is facing off against Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.
Earlier this year, Sauer won a resounding victory before the US Supreme Court in one of Trump's criminal cases. The court recognized far-reaching presidential immunity that delivered a siginificant setback to the Washington, DC-based criminal case aginst Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Trump didn't show up to those oral arguments, either, in part because he was in another Manhattan courtroom during a trial for a different criminal case, where a jury found him guilty of falsifying business documents as part of a different election interference scheme in 2016.
Blanche and Bove, who represent part of his team in the Manhattan criminal case, have cited the US Supreme Court ruling to fight the verdict in that case as well. New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over the trial, is expected to decide Friday whether he will once again delay Trump's sentencing, which is scheduled for September 18.
Presidential immunity played a role in earlier court fights in the Carroll case. A Second Circuit panel previously ruled that Trump waived any presidential immunity protections and could not argue that they applied as he disparaged Carroll from the White House.
In an interview with BI after the verdict in her first trial last year, Carroll said she heard from hundreds of readers that her court verdicts gave them home that they could hold their own abusers accountable.
"They think, 'Well, if the former President of the United States can be held liable for sexual abuse, well then maybe my stepfather, maybe my old boss, maybe my ex-boyfriend, maybe that man who lived down the street — maybe I can hold them accountable for ruining my life,'" Carroll told BI.
