Trump was convicted of sexual assault and fined $5 million.. What’s the story?

A federal appeals court in the United States on Monday upheld a jury ruling in a civil case that US President-elect Donald Trump sexually assaulted a female newspaper writer at a luxury department store in the mid-1990s.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a written opinion upholding a fine of Trump of five million dollars, the value of the fine imposed by a Manhattan jury in favor of journalist E. Jane Carroll for being subjected to defamation and sexual assault.
Trump was absent from the trial after repeatedly denying that the attack had occurred, but he testified briefly in another defamation trial earlier this year that resulted in $83.3 million in damages.

Donald Trump impeachment trial

The second trial resulted from statements made by President Trump in 2019 after Carroll made these accusations publicly for the first time in a memoir.
In its ruling today, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals rejected claims by Trump’s lawyers that Judge Lewis Kaplan made several decisions that tainted the trial, including his decision to allow two other women who accused Trump of sexually assaulting them to testify.
The Second Circuit said: “We conclude that Mr. Trump did not prove that the district court erred in any of the contested rulings… In addition, he did not bear the burden of proving that any alleged error or combination of alleged errors affected his substantive rights as required to justify Hold a new trial.