Donald Trump was ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll $83 million on Friday, after a jury last May said Trump sexually assaulted Carroll decades ago and a new jury on Friday decided only a massive sum close to nine-figures would stop Trump from continuing to defame the journalist about the assault.
It already appears the verdict wasn’t enough, as Trump almost immediately went online and used Carroll's name to say she was making a “False Accusation.”
The former president has remained defiant for years, making continued false denials ever since Carroll first came forward with her traumatic experience. The former president has relentlessly attacked Carroll, even after a separate jury concluded last year that the sexual assault occurred and Carroll should receive $5 million.
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In this trial, Carroll’s lawyers asked the jury to award her $12 million to repair her reputation, an additional sum for her “emotional harm,” and an untold figure to dissuade Trump from abusing his immense political power and wealth to continue his defamation.
The jury on Friday responded by pegging the theoretical “reputational repair” program at $11 million, awarding her $7.3 million for enduring the ongoing personal suffering, and a whopping $65 million in punitive damages. The total judgment comes out to $83.3 million.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan had instructed the nine jurors—whose profiles cut across New York City’s diverse population—to consider a punitive damages figure that would be “intended to punish a defendant and deter his future defamatory statements.”
The jury responded with $65 million, which is a massive blow to the real estate tycoon infamous for inflating his net worth.
The verdict comes just before another expected wallop against the supposed billionaire’s real estate empire, that one coming from a New York state judge who already concluded that Trump routinely overstated his assets and committed bank fraud for nearly a decade. In that case, the New York Attorney General has asked Justice Arthur F. Engoron to yank $370 million from him for activities at the Trump Organization.
The combined one-two punch threatens to turn the billionaire’s finances upside down just as he seeks the 2024 Republican nomination for president on his quest to return to the White House.
Although the trial itself was saddled with contentious fighting and bitter outbursts from Trump, its conclusion was muted. Trump, who ghosted the entirety of his first rape defamation trial last year, ducked out early and avoided being in the courtroom when the verdict was read.
Jurors deliberated for two hours and 45 minutes, slightly shorter than they did during the last Carroll case. Just before the moment of truth, Trump lawyer Alina Habba hugged one of Carroll's lawyers, Shawn Crowley. Court staff announced that a verdict was ready at 4:25 p.m. and entered the courtroom minutes later.
The woman leading the nine-person jury handed the judge's law clerk a dark yellow manila envelope, which was then read out loud. Each juror later avowed they stood by the verdict, ensuring that the decision was unanimous.
Judge Kaplan then told the jury—which he had kept anonymous for their own safety, given the raucous political atmosphere of the country at the moment and the threat of reprisal from Trump's loyal fanbase—that they were now free to identify themselves. However, he advised them not to.
“My advice to you is to never disclose that you were on this jury,” he said.
Trump's strategy in court amounted to an unapologetic refusal to accept reality, with his lawyers unabashedly shifting the blame for his unceasing verbal attacks on Carroll—trying to convince jurors that she bore some responsibility for his public denials and the backlash from his fans that followed.
In her closing argument, Habba casually referred to “his truth” in an attempt to justify Trump's relentless dishonesty about the attack. But when it was the opposing side's turn, Crowley wasn't having it.
“Ladies and gentlemen, his truth was a lie, and he had no right to say it,” she said.
That dialectic strikes at the heart of what has come to define the Trump Age of American politics: Trump's fabricated tales versus the truth. And while that dichotomy has become an overwhelming dividing line in the halls of Congress, TV news shows, and households, it was no barrier in this courtroom overlooking lower Manhattan.
Every time Trump and his lawyers tried to ignore the previous jury's finding that he had sexually assaulted a woman—something the judge has asserted in court filings was, in common parlance, a “rape”—the judge would shut them down.
In a hearing yesterday with the jury out of the courtroom, the lawyers debated the language on the verdict form. Trump defense lawyer Michael Madaio tried to spare his client the embarrassment and peril of allowing jurors to hear exactly what happened on that evening inside Manhattan's Bergdorf Goodman department store.
“Again, your Honor, I think it is unnecessary to include the graphic language concerning the underlying act itself. I think a general description—sexual abuse, sexual assault—will suffice,” he said.
“Overruled,” the judge shot back.
Former President Donald Trump gestures at a rally in advance of the New Hampshire primary.
Mike Segar/ReutersThat same fight played out in court in a myriad of ways over the past two weeks. No matter how many times the judge asserted that Trump himself was responsible—at one point saying, “he did it”—the former president simply wouldn't own up to his actions or the failure of his attorneys to succeed in defending him in court. Trump's simmering rage was evident in his angry murmuring from the defense table, his penchant for walking out, and his nonstop public declarations outside the courtroom.
It reached a boiling point on Friday afternoon, when the judge instructed the jury and finally went into detail about what exactly Trump did years ago that put him in this situation. Trump slumped in his seat with an incredulous look on his face when the federal judge told jurors Trump had “forcibly inserted his fingers into her vagina.”
Habba tried to put a backstop to that during her final argument in front of jurors, when she told them, “You heard him say he didn't intend to hurt her.” It was a non-apology, one that she followed up by trying to decouple Trump from his rabid followers, trashing his MAGA trolls by calling them “sick individuals whose messages should be universally condemned.”
But if Trump agrees that some of his followers are “sick individuals,” he's never denounced them. Instead, almost immediately after the ruling came down, Trump took to Truth Social to blast the verdict.
“Absolutely ridiculous!” he wrote just a few minutes after the jury ruled against him. “I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party. Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon. They have taken away all First Amendment Rights. THIS IS NOT AMERICA!”
Conspicuously absent from that statement, however, was E. Jean Carroll, an early indication that Trump may finally be dissuaded from attacking the former journalist.
But, true to form, just minutes after the Truth Social post, Trump took to Telegram—another social media site—to continue the very behavior the jurors had just tried to dramatically disincentivize.
“We asked for one Trial, on the E. Jean Carroll False Accusation Case, but the Judge wouldn’t give it to us, he made us have two Trials on the same Hoax, and then, on the second Trial, they were allowed to use whatever information they wanted from the first, but we weren’t allowed to use anything!” Trump wrote. “As an example, the Depositions they’re using on the second Trial were taken in the first. He wouldn’t allow us to use the totally exonerating Anderson Cooper/CNN Interview on either trial, but none of it in the second. Our Legal System is in shambles! This is another Biden Demanded Witch Hunt against his Political Opponent, funded and managed by Radical Left Democrats. The Courts are totally stacked against me, have never been used against a Political Opponent, like this, but in the end, we will win it all, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
If the $83.3 million had seemed like a gargantuan amount of money, it apparently wasn't enough.
