A federal appeals court has announced it will not grant a rare meeting of its active judges to hear an appeal of the $83m civil case verdict against Donald Trump for defaming magazine advice columnist E Jean Carroll over a forced sexual encounter three decades ago.

The second US circuit court of appeals was divided late on Wednesday in its decision, ultimately, to reject proceeding to a so-called en banc hearing, a rare meeting of all of its judges to consider a conclusion.

The development came almost 18 months after Trump appealed, shortly after winning election to a second term in the White House, to the US supreme court against a decision by a separate jury. That jury awarded $5m to Carroll after concluding that Trump had sexually abused her in a department store dressing room in New York in 1996 and, much later, defamed her.

The highest US court has not yet declared whether it will be willing to hear the case. Lawyers for the US president did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said in a statement that her client was “eager for this case, originally filed in 2019, to be over so that she can finally obtain justice”.

After a three-judge second circuit panel last September rejected Trump’s appeal of the $83m verdict in New York in January 2024, an appeals judge asked the other Manhattan appeals jurists to hear the case.

The second circuit said on Wednesday evening that five judges voted against a rehearing before all the judges while three judges voted in favor of the en banc procedure.

The judge, Denny Chin, wrote that it was the fourth time the second circuit had denied a request for all judges to hear an appeal in the case.

He noted that Carroll first publicly asserted in 2019 in a memoir that Trump had sexually abused her in the 1990s in the dressing room of the luxury Bergdorf Goodman department store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.

Trump then claimed he had never met her, called it a false accusation and said Carroll was lying and that “she’s not my type”, in an interview. Carroll sued him for defamation in November 2019.

Trump did not attend a May 2023 trial when a jury found that he had sexually abused Carroll and later defamed her. But he briefly testified at a second trial in January 2024 when a jury awarded Carroll $83m for defamation.

Chin defended the appeals court’s decision to uphold the large defamation award.

“The record showed that Trump made multiple statements over many years accusing Carroll of lying for political and financial gain, and suggesting that Carroll was too unattractive for Trump to have sexually assaulted her,” he wrote.

“As a result of Trump’s statements, Carroll was harassed and humiliated, subjected to death threats, and feared for her physical safety for years. And Trump showed no remorse, continuing his attacks against Carroll during and after two federal trials, and even proclaiming two days into the first trial in the Carroll case that he would continue to defame her ‘a thousand times’,” Chin said.

Three circuit judges – Steven J Menashi, Michael H Park and Debra Ann Livingston – voted for the full second circuit to hear the appeal.

In a dissent written by Menashi, they agreed that the appeals panel that heard the case should have let the United States be substituted for Trump as the defendant after the attorney general certified that he was acting in the “scope of his office or employment” when the claim arose during his first term in the White House, after winning the 2016 presidential election. And they said Trump should have been able to argue that he was protected by presidential immunity.

They also agreed that Trump should be granted a new trial and concluded that the size of the award for defamation was “grossly excessive”.

“Put together, these proceedings represent a manifest miscarriage of justice,” Menashi wrote.

But those dissenters were outvoted by the majority.

The Associated Press contributed reporting