Donald Trump is sending a lawyer to another courtroom on Friday, when he tries to overturn a Manhattan civil case that concludes the former president is a rapist.
Oral arguments will have a distinct, Harvey Weinstein-esque ring to them, judging from court filings.
As the presidential election approaches, Trump’s legal team Republicans are rushing to erase the candidate’s rap sheet and tidy up his lawsuit damage.
on friday, Lawyer d. John Sauer He is scheduled to appear in a federal appeals courtroom in Manhattan, where he will contest the 2023 jury verdict that found the former president. Author E. Responsible for defaming and sexually abusing Jean Carroll. The judge overseeing the trial later concluded that “Trump raped her Many people understand the word ‘rape’ in general.
Before a three-judge panel for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Sauer is set to argue that the jury in Carroll’s trial should never have heard evidence of other alleged sexual assaults.
It includes evidence “Access Hollywood” “Catch ’em” tapeAnd testimony by two women who told jurors that Trump sexually assaulted them, One in the plane In the mid-70s and One at Mar-a-Lago In 2005.
It’s a strategy that worked on appeal for Weinstein.
In April, the New York State Supreme Court Overturned Weinstein’s 2020 Manhattan sex crime conviction In a 4-3 decision, the trial judge improperly allowed the testimony of three defendants who were not part of the indictment. (Weinstein remains on retrial in New York; he is serving time separately 16 years sentence From a rape conviction in Los Angeles, to which he is also appealing.)
But lawyers who won Weinstein’s appeal told Business Insider that what worked for their client may not work for Trump.
That’s because Weinstein’s jury sat in a New York state criminal courtroom, where longstanding rules of evidence strictly limit evidence of a so-called prior bad act, lawyers for the disgraced Hollywood mogul noted.
Federal court is a very different place, they said — where Trump will likely find the rules of evidence stacked inexorably against him.
“It’s not apples and apples,” explained Barry Cummins, a Weinstein appellate attorney and former Brooklyn-based state Supreme Court justice.
Federal trial rules allow other sexual assault evidence to be heard in civil sexual assault trials, and have been since the mid-’90s, Cummins said, now. Aidala, Bertuna and Cummins.
“It’s funny, but Trump would have been better off in state court than in federal court, which is why he brought the case there,” Cummins said of Carroll’s lawyers.
Carroll, the architect of the law used to bring the lawsuit against Trump, agreed.
Marcy Hamilton, who runs the sexual abuse victim advocacy group Child USA and helped write the New York law, said the civil case allows witnesses to “show a pattern.”
“This is basically what’s happening — especially when you have a perpetrator with multiple alleged victims,” she said. “That pattern makes a big difference in explaining to the jury exactly who this person was and how he operated.”
Trump’s lawyers are arguing Weinstein’s
The first of Carroll’s two trials against Trump is on appeal in the case she brought under New York’s Adult Survivors Act.
The law — passed in the wake of reports about Weinstein’s sexual harassment and the #MeToo movement — opened a one-year window where accusers could bring sexual misconduct lawsuits that would otherwise be barred by the statute of limitations.
Carroll accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman’s department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. Includes trials Carol takes a deposition from herselfas well as from two friends who testified that she told contemporaries that Trump had sexually assaulted her.
US District Judge Louis Kaplan also allowed the testimony of Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, whose claims were not part of the lawsuit.
Leeds described being forced onto a plane twenty years ago when Trump was found to have sexually assaulted Carroll. Stoynoff, a journalist, described a similar attack during an interview at Mar-a-Lago. That attack took place in 2005, she testified, 20 years after the Carroll attack and around the time Trump bragged about grabbing women by the genitalia on the “Access Hollywood” tape.
Similar testimony doomed the Weinstein case.
The New York state Supreme Court ruled the prosecution’s prior-bad-act witnesses — the trio who testified that Weinstein sexually assaulted them but whose claims were not part of the criminal indictment — should never have taken the stand.
In Trump’s appeal brief, his lawyers argue that Leeds and Stoynoff’s testimony and the “Access Hollywood” tapes should never have been allowed at trial, and they cite a federal rule that is similar to the state-level one that struck down Weinstein’s prosecution.
In particular, the jury should never have heard Leeds’ highly prejudicial testimony that Trump told her, “You’re that cunt from the airplane,” and that Stoynoff says Trump insisted that “we’re going to have an affair,” Blanche and Bowe argue. does
Diane Keisel, a New York Law School professor and former state trial judge, told Business Insider that she believes the evidence meets the criteria to be included in the trial. The “Access Hollywood” tapes and testimony from Leeds and Stoynoff helped show Trump’s “motive, intent and opportunity” in his encounter with Carroll, which is admissible under federal evidence rules, she said.
“The fact that you have e. ‘He did that to me at Burgdorf,’ says Jean Carroll. And he says, ‘You can do anything to women, they let you do it,'” she said. “And then two other women came out of the woodwork from 50 years ago and said he did exactly the same thing — my So, I think it goes straight to the purpose, the objective.”
Judge Caplan wrote in his ruling that the evidence was admissible at trial under various federal rules of procedure. It includes rules that allow for testimony about “similar acts” in sexual assault cases.
“As his testimony shows, Trump suddenly groped a woman in a semi-public place, pressed her body against her, kissed her and sexually touched her without consent, and later categorically denied the allegations, revealing that Carroll’s lawyers wrote in the brief that The accuser was so attractive to her that she assaulted her.
Civil cases like Carroll’s have different standards
Friday’s courtroom battle will feature Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplanwho oversaw two rulings in Carroll’s favor. In a May 2023 verdict, the jury found Trump liable for sexual harassment and defamation and awarded Carroll $5 million in damages. in Another trial, earlier this yearA separate jury said Trump owed Carroll an additional $83 million In damages for defamation.
Kaplan (who is not related to the trial judge) will face off against Sauer, who recently won a landslide victory for Trump before the US Supreme Court, which Sweeping Presidential Immunity Validation In a criminal election interference case against him.
Trump’s best chance in Friday’s appeal may be to continue to argue that the two other accusers who testified, Leeds and Stronoff, describe assaults too far removed from Carroll’s time to be relevant, Weinstein attorney Arthur Aidala said.
While the federal rules of evidence for civil sexual assault trials are much more expansive, a judge still can’t go too far, he said.
“It must be reasonable, and the appellate court can take into account the gap between the plaintiff and the witnesses’ accounts of this ‘activity,'” he said.
Crucially, the jury in Carroll’s case was not required to reach their conclusion that Trump sexually abused Carroll “beyond a reasonable doubt” — standard in criminal trials.
Instead, they needed to find that it was “more likely than not” that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll, which is a more common standard in civil cases.
Even if an appeals court finds that some trial testimony should not have reached the jury’s ears, the standard leaves little room to uphold the verdict anyway, according to Hamilton, the architect of the Adult Survivors Act.
“It’s not unusual that in a civil case, you’ll have defendants try arguments from the criminal law to try to bolster their case,” she said. “But in the end, it’s just apples to oranges. They are not the same thing.”
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