Trump appeals verdict in E Jean Carroll case: story is 'utterly impossible,' lacking evidence

Speaking at Trump Tower in New York City after a hearing to ask to overturn the final verdict against Trump in the E Jean Carroll case, Trump attorney Will Scharf said that "E Jean Carroll’s story at its heart is an utterly implausible, he said she said story."

Scharf said that there has been "no corroboration for anything she has ever claimed about President Trump," saying that there are no corroborating witnesses, confirmatory DNA, and a lack of police report filed at the time of the incident. He said Carroll "was unable to identify when this incident occurred until quite recently. No surveillance evidence or witnesses have ever been found or come forward confirming any asked of E Jean Carroll’s story."

"In light of that, in light of the utter implausibility of the story that E Jean Carroll was attempting to sell to the jury in this case, her attorneys introduced evidence that should have never seen the inside of a courtroom," Scharf continued.

Scharf pointed to two witnesses that were allowed to testify at the trial: Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff. Leeds claimed that Trump assaulted her on a plane in 1979, but she "has never been able to identify where this plane departed from, where it went to, the date of the flight in question, making our efforts to disprove her testimony extremely difficult under the Federal Rules of Evidence," Scharf said.

"This story should have never been allowed to be presented to the jury in this case," he continued. "The same is true of Natasha Stoynoff’s story, which again lacks any indicia of reliability, any sort of credibility, any sort of confirming testimony from other witnesses or anything else that would make you believe this actually happened."

Scharf said, "you have a judge who allowed in this improper propensity evidence that should not have been allowed in. In our view, that polluted the jury's deliberations in this case that presented a story to the jury of a series of a pattern of conduct that the jury should not have been considering. And we think that absent that propensity evidence, no fair jury could have reached the verdict that was reached in this case, and as a result, we believe that this verdict needs to be overturned."

In May of 2023, a jury found Trump was found liable of battery and not liable of rape in the civil case regarding Carroll’s claims that Trump had raped her in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s. Trump was ordered to pay $5 million in the case that he and his legal team are appealing.  In January 2024, Trump was ordered to pay $83 million in the defamation case brought forth by Carroll.

Carroll has never been able to say exactly when the incident occurred, and had to backtrack her initial claims when it turned out the dress she said she was wearing had not been made yet by designer Donna Karan.

The three-judge panel of the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals is unlikely to issue a ruling before November’s election, the Associated Press reported.