Sexual assault

Federal court upholds fine for Trump

(Bild: AP)

A few weeks before Donald Trump takes office as US President, an appeals court has upheld his conviction and fine for sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll.

The three-judge panel of the competent federal appeals court ruled on Monday that Trump had not been able to prove his accusation that there had been procedural errors in the lower court.

Found guilty in civil trial the previous year
Last year, after a nine-day civil trial, the jury of a New York court found Trump guilty of sexually assaulting Carroll in a Manhattan department store in 1996. Trump was ordered to pay the former columnist for the women's magazine "Elle" two million dollars (just under two million euros) for the sexual assault and a further three million dollars for defamation.

Carroll (pictured) accuses Trump of raping her in a changing room at a luxury department store in New York in 1996.

(Bild: AP)

Trump denied the allegations and appealed after his conviction. He argued that two women who also testified that they had been victims of Trump's sexual assaults should not have been heard as witnesses in the civil trial.

Accusation of rape in a changing room
Carroll accuses Trump of raping her in a changing room at the Bergdorf Goodman luxury department store in New York in 1996. The long-time columnist for Elle magazine first made her accusation public in 2019, when Trump was president. The Republican then accused Carroll of lying and declared that she was not his "type". In the years that followed, Trump repeatedly accused the journalist of inventing the sexual assault. He also referred to Carroll as a "crazy person".

Further proceedings were dropped
In another defamation trial, the jury ordered Trump to pay 83.3 million US dollars to Carroll in January. The former and future US president has also appealed against this verdict.

The legal dispute with Carroll is not Trump's only legal trouble. However, two federal justice proceedings against Trump for election manipulation and for storing secret government documents in his private residence at Mar-a-Lago were dropped after Trump's victory in the presidential election on November 5. Special investigator Jack Smith justified the decision by referring to the US federal judiciary's practice of not prosecuting sitting presidents since the Watergate scandal.

First convicted felon in the White House
Apart from these proceedings, Trump was found guilty in May of falsifying business documents to cover up a hush money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels. This makes Trump the first politician in US history to enter the White House as a convicted felon. In mid-December, the judge responsible had refused to dismiss the case, but postponed the announcement of the sentence indefinitely.