Unless a new trial is ordered an appeal works from the record of the trial court and no be evidence is considered. The appeal is to determine if there were errors as a matter of law.
As this is a civil case the standard is a preponderance of the evidence. By trunk not putting on a defense the preponderance of the evidence by definition favored the petitioner. It is unclear to me why Trump failed to put on a defense. His expert pulling out was a bit surprising. Additionally I wonder if his calculus was not to take the stand as it may hurt him in other cases.
In either event regardless of the actual truth, this verdict and Trumps on again off again testimony is not particularly great optics. The truth is not particularly important in politics. The appearance here — being found liable for sexual abuse and battery will drive a wedge much further between him and the suburban women demographic. This will reduce his chances of winning a general election.
The judge in this case was so biased against the Trump team he not only had his thumb on the scales of justice, he had his entire butt sitting on the scales on the Plaintiff’s side.
Judge Kaplan (yes, the same name as the Plaintiff’s lead attorney) would sustained every single one of the Plaintiff’s objections, no matter what it was. He cited New York State Law incorrectly, and his own Circuit’s rules wrongly to rule against trump, and ‘schooled’ the Trump attorneys, who had years of litigation and trial experience, in front of the jury on ‘how to properly cross examine a witness!’ Multiple times, the judge jumped in to answer a question asked of a witness to answer the question for the witness, instead of allowing the witness to answer. He bailed witnesses out of being impeached on their own testimony in discovery by interrupting the Trump Attorney and telling to stop asking that and move on. When it came to a question of dates and times, the judge interrupted to say “We can all do math, move on!” not allowing the point to be made. At every opportunity, the judge sidetracked the Defense’s tactics to question the witnesses. He allowed witnesses who had not been through Voir dire by the defence to testify contrary to the rules of evidence. Yet would not allow the Trump witnesses they wanted to bring. He ruled that TRUE facts the Trump team wanted to bring in be brought up, even though E. Jean Carroll had actually testified about her awareness of them. He even excluded these actual facts from the closing argument and in his Jury instructions told them that they could not include them AS FACTS in their deliberations.
There are so many examples of Judicial misconduct on the record that Trump’s team wrote to the judge asking for a mistrial half way through the trial due to his ‘blatant misconduct,’ giving seven specific examples among many. Judge Kaplan denied it out of hand. This egregious conduct is more than enough reason to appeal on these grounds as well… in addition to the passage of an ex post facto law invalidating the long past statute of limitations for such suits which many spoken arguments at the time of passage were claiming would allow for “getting Donald Trump!” Such ex post facto laws are on their face unconstitutional, especially ones aimed at specific individuals.