Your support helps us to tell the story
As he detailed sexual assault allegations against him in two defamation cases he lost, Donald Trump said he was “very disappointed” in his legal team while half a dozen of his attorneys surrounded him in the lobby of Trump Tower on Friday.
Trump attended brief oral arguments in a federal appeals court hearing in Manhattan on Friday morning, where attorneys argued to reverse a $5 million defamation verdict against the former president, who a jury found liable for sexually abusing the writer E Jean Carroll in a department store in the 1990s.
Trump insists that he has never met Carroll and has labelled her a liar, claims that landed him a second defamation lawsuit, which he lost earlier this year. A separate jury awarded Carroll more than $83 million.
In remarks billed as a press conference, which his campaign announced to reporters late on Thursday night, Trump once again repeated those allegedly defamatory statements that have him on the hook for tens of millions of dollars.
“I’ve never met the woman — other than this picture, which could have been AI-generated,” he said in front of reporters and camera crews assembled behind a barricade in the lobby of his Manhattan skyscraper.
That photograph, which was included in a 2019 New York magazine article, shows Carroll laughing beside Trump with his then-wife Ivana Trump in 1987.
“They have a picture from, they say, about 40 years ago, a picture,” Trump said. “And the picture depicts her and her husband on a celebrity line where I was the celebrity. I was — been a celebrity for a long time. And they were shaking my hands along with hundreds of other people. Nobody even knows where it is.”
A caption in the article notes it was outside a party for NBC.
“Showed up out of nowhere, but it’s just fine,” he said. “Nice picture with her, her husband and lots of other people are on line. It’s a celebrity line.”
Asked whether Carroll will raise those claims in court or file additional defamation complaints, her attorney Roberta Kaplan told The Independent: “I’ve said before and I’ll say it again: all options are on the table.”
In his rambling remarks, Trump also brought up allegations from another woman, Jessica Leeds, who accused the former president of sexually assaulting her on a flight in the 1970s.
“What are the chances of that happening?” he said.
He added: “She would not have been the chosen one.”
Trump stood at a lectern with a pile of handwritten notes, which photographers captured as saying “no place report” and “no witnesses” in scrawled-out black ink on white paper with his presidential campaign’s logo.
Flanked by his lawyers, including several attorneys who have argued the Carroll cases on his behalf, Trump said he was “disappointed” in them.
“I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “They’re good, they’re good people, they’re talented people.”
His remarks arrived just five days before he debates his Democratic rival Kamala Harris, a former district attorney and state attorney general who has designed her campaign around the idea of a “prosecutor” taking on a criminally convicted fraud. “I know Donald Trump’s type,” she has frequently said in campaign remarks.
Moments after Trump left the press conference without taking any questions from reporters, who he said should be “ashamed,” the Manhattan judge overseeing his hush money case agreed to delay his setencing until after the November presidential election.
He will not return to Justice Juan Merchan’s courtroom until November 26, nearly six months after a unanimous jury found him guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of a scheme to corruptly influence the 2016 election.
