A US appeals court has upheld a federal judge’s earlier ruling that Trump cannot claim immunity.

Donald Trump cannot invoke presidential immunity against a libel lawsuit from a writer E Jean Carrollwho had accused him of rape, a US appeals court has ruled and punished the former US president again legal setback.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan on Wednesday upheld a federal judge’s decision to reject Trump’s claim of immunity, finding that Trump had waited too long to raise it as a defense.

Alina Habba, one of Trump’s lawyers in the case, called the ruling “fundamentally flawed” and said: Trump card would seek “immediate review” from the Supreme Court.

Carroll’s lawsuit sought at least $10 million in damages from Trump over comments he made in June 2019, when he was president, after she first publicly accused him of assaulting her in the locker room in the mid-1990s of raping a department store in Manhattan. Trump denied knowing Carroll, saying she wasn’t his “type” and that she made up the rape allegations to promote her upcoming memoir.

The former Elle magazine columnist filed suit in November 2019, but Trump waited until December 2022 before claiming that absolute presidential immunity protected him from her lawsuit. Thereafter, a president enjoys complete immunity from many types of civil lawsuits while in office.

In June, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan rejected Trump’s attempt to dismiss Carroll’s case and later refused to let Trump raise an immunity defense, saying the assertion came too late and violated the public interest in accountability.

The 2nd Circuit said Wednesday that those decisions were correct.

“A delay of three years is more than sufficient under our precedents to be considered ‘unreasonable,'” a three-judge panel wrote in its opinion.

Trump’s appeal was heard on an expedited basis, ahead of the trial scheduled for January 16, 2024.

He has sought similar protections of immunity in his federal criminal case in Washington, in which he is accused of improperly trying to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Carroll has already won a civil case against Trump. In May, a jury awarded her $5 million in a second trial for sexual assault and defamation after Trump again denied her allegations last October. Trump is appealing this ruling.

On September 6, Kaplan ruled that the jury’s May findings applied to Carroll’s first lawsuit, affirming Trump’s denial defamatory. The only question that remained was how much money Trump should pay Carroll in damages.

“We are pleased that the Second Circuit has affirmed Judge Kaplan’s rulings and we can now proceed with the trial,” Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said in a statement.

Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2024 US election despite facing four federal and state criminal charges. He pleaded not guilty in those cases.