Donald Trump is in a bind.
The former president is already in trouble in his New York bank fraud trial over his penchant for inflating his net worth. But now, his bragging may end up costing him in his ongoing rape defamation trial as well.
On Thursday, lawyers for plaintiff E. Jean Carroll showed jurors the real estate billionaire gloating about his vast wealth, emphasizing the potential need for massive punitive damages for Trump to feel enough pain to motivate him to stop slandering Carroll.
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Carroll is suing Trump for defamation over the way he denied sexually assaulting her when he was president, and Carroll’s lawyers have already suggested that a huge financial penalty may be necessary to get Trump to stop his ongoing Truth Social posts about Carroll.
Nine New York jurors will decide how badly to punish Trump for defaming her—something he keeps doing to this very day—and setting a high enough dollar figure to dissuade him from continuing to do so.
But in order to show jurors a glimpse of how far they’d have to go to correct his unapologetically recalcitrant behavior, Carroll’s attorneys relied on a deposition Trump gave under oath at an unrelated case against the New York Attorney General. In that separate case, Trump countered accusations that he inflated his assets and lied to banks by asserting that he did indeed have a near bottomless bank account.
Carroll’s team is now using that against him. If he’s really that rich, then there’s more money to grab.
In the video shown to jurors on Thursday, Trump can be seen answering questions about his inflated sense of self-importance from AG senior enforcement counsel Kevin Wallace, comparing his brand value to that of Coca-Cola.
“In my case, I know it’s billions and billions and billions of dollars,” Trump said under oath, not aware that his testimony would later be used as a target in a defamation claim.
During the deposition he threw around all kinds of sky-high figures, pegging his famous name and related brand at $2.9 billion and even $3 billion.
“I wrote a book recently and it sold through the roof!” he said. “It’s all brand value.”
The appearance of this law enforcement case in his civil defamation case shows how Trump’s many legal woes are coalescing into a massive fireball, one that is simultaneously threatening his businesses, his 2024 presidential run, and even his freedom. The twice-impeached, quadruple-indicted former president is currently facing a full calendar that will take him to criminal and civil courtrooms across the country in Florida, Georgia, New York, and Washington, D.C.
“We have a lot of cash, we have great assets,” he said during the April 13, 2023 deposition at the New York AG’s office in downtown Manhattan.
For minutes, Trump gloated about his net worth. At one point, he even bragged about the secondary market for his collectible digital trading cards.
“Some of the cards are selling for $82,000,” he crowed.
Notably, the decision by Carroll’s lawyers to show Trump’s bank fraud testimony in federal court gave jurors a particular target by highlighting one prized property on Trump’s Monopoly board: his massive oceanside Florida estate of Mar-a-Lago.
During his deposition, Trump asserted that Mar-a-Lago alone could be worth “$1.5 billion.” (Palm Beach property appraisers have pegged it between $18 million and $28 million.)
Carroll’s strategy capitalized on Trump’s defense in that other case, in which a judge showed skepticism that the mansion could be worth so much more than what Trump officially reported on local property tax assessments. Carroll’s legal team repurposed that testimony by turning it into a bullseye.
