NEW YORK — Around an hour after former President Donald Trump appeared in a New York courtroom on Friday to challenge a civil jury’s findings that he sexually abused and defamed writer E. Jean Carroll, the GOP presidential nominee appeared to defame her once again.

In comments to reporters at a Trump Tower press conference at which he did not take questions, Trump claimed Carroll “fabricated” the sexual assault he was found liable for in May 2023, “looking to promote a book.”

“I should be suing her for defamation,” Trump charged. “I never touched her.”

The former president is on the hook for more than $88 million in damages awarded to Carroll for the 1996 assault and near-identical comments he made about the advice columnist during his time in the White House and after.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: all options are on the table,” Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, told the Daily News when asked for her reaction to Trump’s continued characterizations of Carroll as a liar.

Arguing before the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals earlier Friday, Trump’s appellate lawyer, John Sauer — who also got a tongue-lashing from Trump at the press conference — sought to overturn the jury’s May 9, 2023, verdict finding him liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room and defaming her on Truth Social after his presidency. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages.

Sauer argued that Carroll’s case was “a textbook example of implausible allegations” propped up by “inflammatory, inadmissible” evidence, including allegations levied by witnesses for Carroll — Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff — that Trump subjected them to unwanted sexual contact in 1979 and 2005, respectively, as well as the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he bragged about having license to molest women.

Sauer, in particular, took issue with the jury hearing Leeds’ allegations that Trump groped her on an airplane, arguing that was not a crime in 1979.

He also alleged Carroll was being “funded and encouraged” by Trump’s political enemies, prompting one of the judges to interrupt him and note that was not relevant to the appeal.

“E. Jean Carroll brought this case because Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in 1996,” Kaplan countered when she stood before the panel, prompting Trump to perk up and look toward the window suddenly. “And then defamed her in 2022 by claiming that she was crazy and made the whole thing up.”

In response to Sauer’s arguments about Leeds’ testimony, Carroll’s lawyer said simple assault on an aircraft was a crime in 1979.

“It was a crime then to grope someone on a plane. It is a crime today to grope someone on a plane,” Kaplan said.

Carroll’s lawyer further argued that Leeds’ allegations closely resembled Carroll’s and what former People reporter Stoynoff told the jury about Trump sticking his tongue down her throat when they were alone together when she interviewed him and his then-new wife, Melania, at Mar-a-Lago.

“He had a pattern of pleasant chatting with a woman and then, all of a sudden — out of nowhere — he would, for lack of a better term, pounce,” Kaplan said.

Kaplan noted that Trump didn’t make any effort to fight the evidence he complained of when the case went on trial.

“He was given every opportunity to take the stand and rebut all this evidence,” Kaplan said. “He did not present one witness.”

Clad in his signature navy blue suit and a bright red tie, Trump, who was not required to attend Friday’s hearing, ambled into the 17th-floor courtroom at the Thurgood Marshall federal courthouse by Foley Square at around 9:55 a.m. He and Carroll did not look at one another as he walked past her or during the arguments that lasted less than 30 minutes.

The three-judge panel appeared skeptical of Trump’s legal positions, with Justice Denny Chin at one point telling Sauer it was “very hard” to overturn a jury’s verdict based on a judge’s evidentiary rulings in asking him why the appeals court should give Trump a new trial.

The panel did not issue a ruling and likely will not before the presidential election on Nov. 5.

Carroll, 80, a longtime advice columnist, testified for almost three days of the spring 2023 trial, emotionally recounting the attack and the death threats and abuse she’d faced after speaking out.

She said the incident occurred after she and Trump bumped into each other by the Fifth Ave luxury department store’s revolving doors, and he invited her to help him pick out lingerie for an unnamed girlfriend.

The writer said the situation took a dark turn when they reached the changing rooms on an unoccupied floor, where Trump closed the door, pushed her against a wall, and started kissing her without consent.

Carroll said Trump became increasingly violent and molested her with his hand before pulling down her tights and raping her. Jurors determined Carroll’s lawyers did not prove by a majority of the evidence that Trump raped her.

The suit filed in November 2022 was the second of two Carroll brought against Trump and among the first filed under the Adult Survivors Act, historic legislation that temporarily lifted the statute of limitations to bring sex assault claims in New York for one year.

A short time after the trial, Manhattan federal court Judge Lewis Kaplan found Trump liable in Carroll’s separate defamation lawsuit against Trump — brought in 2020 — which accused him of defaming her when he was president. Trump bogged that case down for years by unsuccessfully invoking presidential immunity.

In January, a second jury that only considered damages determined Trump owed Carroll an additional $83.3 million for the comments he made as president, which accused her of lying about the assault to sell a book.

Trump attended that trial and spent less than three minutes on the stand, during which he wasn’t permitted to deny the assault or that he had defamed Carroll. He is also appealing the outcomes of that lawsuit.

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