E Jean Carroll’s lawyer says ‘all options on the table’ after Trump attacks her again in rambling remarks

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 foundliable 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,