Trump appeals $5m verdict in sexual abuse trial

 Former US President Donald Trump is appealing after a New York jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming a writer who now says she might sue him for the third time.

Trump's lawyers filed a notice of appeal in the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday afternoon, May 11, less than 48 hours after a Manhattan jury awarded $5million to columnist E Jean Carroll.

Jurors on Tuesday found Trump guilty, ordering him to pay roughly $2million in damages to Carroll for civil battery, and nearly $3million for her successfully proving that he defamed her by calling her case 'a complete con job' and 'a Hoax and a lie'.

Trump's team filed the appeal on the same day that Carroll said she may sue Trump a third time, after he made disparaging comments about her in a Wednesday night CNN town hall.

The ex-president in the televised town hall mocked Carroll as a 'whack job' and called the case 'rigged'.

'What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you’re playing hanky-panky in a dressing room?' said Trump, as some of his supporters in the audience laughed.

Carroll said she was asleep while Trump criticized her on TV but that her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, sent her a transcript of his remarks. She said she stopped reading the remarks after the first paragraph.

'It’s just stupid, it’s just disgusting, vile, foul, it wounds people,' Carroll told The New York Times on Thursday.

Kaplan said they have not decided if they will file a new defamation case. In addition to the rape and defamation case that concluded in Carroll's favor, the writer has an earlier defamation case against Trump that remains pending.

'Everything’s on the table, obviously, and we have to give serious consideration to it,' Kaplan told the newspaper. 'We have to weigh the various pros and cons and we’ll come to a decision in the next day or so, probably.'