Very Stable Genius Trump Must Pay $83.3 Million to E. Jean Carroll
Donald Trump owes the writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her after she revealed the former president sexually abused her in the mid-1990s, a jury determined on Friday.
The jury awarded $7.3 million for damage to Carroll’s reputation, $11 million for emotional harm, and $65 million for punitive damages.
The jury deliberated for less than three hours, a remarkably speedy end to a high-profile case. In Trump’s first trial against Carroll, that jury also deliberated for less than three hours.
Trump now owes Carroll a total of $88.3 million. In May, a separate jury unanimously found Trump liable of sexual abuse and battery against Carroll and of defaming her a different time. That jury recommended Carroll be awarded $5 million in damages.
Carroll is far from the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, but her lawsuits have been the first to make it to a courtroom. Trump has vehemently denied all of the allegations, aiming particular vitriol at Carroll—including during this trial. Some of his posts insulting her on social media became evidence almost in real time.
Trump sat in the courtroom for every day of the trial except one, when he attended his mother-in-law’s funeral. He also testified on Thursday, a marked shift from the first trial when he declined to show up at all. He was on the stand for just three minutes, during which he said he stood “100 percent” behind his deposition denying that he had assaulted Carroll or even met her before.
Trump was not, however, present in the courtroom when the verdict was read out. As it turns out, all his protestations didn’t change the facts of the matter. This trial was only to set damages, after presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled in September that since Trump has already been found liable for sexual abuse, his comments are by default defamatory.
Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. Her first lawsuit against him was for the assault and for posts he made about her on social media in November 2022.
The trial that wrapped up Friday was for comments he made in 2019 and in 2023. Trump alleged in 2019 that Carroll had made up the rape allegation to promote her book. And then, hours after he was found liable for sexual abuse, he went on CNN and repeated comments about Carroll that had just been deemed defamatory.