President Donald Trump has hit a new snag in his presidency after the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a previous ruling that ordered him to pay $83.3 million to writer Jean E Carroll, a woman who filed sexual assault and defamation charges against him. 

Following a landmark Supreme Court ruling in July that exempted Mr Trump from facing charges for official acts committed during his first presidential term, Mr Trump relied on the ruling to escape a federal jury decision to pay Ms Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her.

Mr Trump’s lawyers argued that the previous ruling “severely damages the presidency and is a great miscarriage of justice”, but Ms Carroll’s legal team led by Roberta Kaplan urged the appellate court to uphold the ruling to show that “the president is not above the law.”

Having heard arguments from both parties, the court dismissed Mr Trump’s immunity argument that the ruling does not exempt him from being liable for the charges. 

Ms Carroll scored a major win on Monday at the appellate court, where three judges (all appointed by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden) unanimously ruled against Mr Trump and decided that there was nothing new in his appeal to warrant a reversal of the previous ruling.

“(W)e conclude that Trump has failed to identify any grounds that would warrant reconsidering our prior holding on presidential immunity. We also conclude that the district court did not err in any of the challenged rulings and that the jury’s damages awards are fair and reasonable,” the ruling said.

When Ms Carroll first accused Mr Trump of raping her in a department store in the 1990s during his first presidential term, the president responded with a barrage of insults, asserting the writer was only looking for a way to cash out  with her book, which, according to him, “should be sold in the fiction section”.

Ms Carroll filed a separate defamation charge against Mr Trump for his scathing comments about her after losing at the polls and another sexual assault charge due to a new New York law that allowed old cases of rape and other sexual harassment claims, that already exceeded the statute of limitations, to be reopened.