NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s lawyers on Friday asked a New York judge to suspend an $83.3 million defamation judgment against the former president, saying there was a “high probability” it would be reduced on appeal , if not eliminated.
The attorneys filed the request in Manhattan federal court, where a civil jury awarded the award to advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in late January after a five-day trial that focused solely on damages. A judge had ordered the jury to accept the findings of another jury that concluded last year that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll in 1996 and defamed her in 2022.
The second jury focused only on statements Trump made in 2019 while he was president in a case long delayed by appeals.
In the filing Friday, Trump’s lawyers wrote that Judge Lewis A. Kaplan should suspend the execution of a sentence he handed down on February 8 until a month after he completes Trump’s post-trial motions, which are due before March 7 are submitted. Otherwise, they said he would have to grant a partially guaranteed reprieve, which would require Trump to post bail for a fraction of the reward.
The attorneys said the $65 million punitive award, on top of $18.3 in compensatory damages, was “plainly excessive” because it violates the Constitution and federal common law.
“There is a strong likelihood that the settlement of post-trial motions will substantially reduce, if not eliminate, the amount of the verdict,” they said.
Trump was not present at a trial last May when a Manhattan jury awarded Carroll $5 million after concluding that the real estate mogul sexually assaulted Carroll in the spring of 1996 in the dressing room of an upscale Bergdorf Goodman store across the street from Trump Plaza in downtown Manhattan.
Since Carroll, 80, first made her claims public in a memoir in 2019, Trump, 77, has repeatedly ridiculed them as lies created to sell her book and harm him politically. He called her a “whack job” and said she wasn’t “his type,” a reference that Carroll testified was meant to imply she was too ugly to rape.
Carroll also testified that she faced death threats from Trump supporters and had her reputation destroyed after comments Trump continued to make even while the trial was underway.
At the second trial, Trump was regularly present and testified briefly, although he conducted most of his communication with the jury by frequently shaking his head and muttering disparaging remarks so loudly that one prosecutor complained that jurors had certainly heard them and that the judge threatened to banish him. from the courtroom.
Roberta Kaplan, an attorney for Carroll and no relation to the judge, declined comment Friday.
Alina Habba, one of Trump’s lawyers, said in a statement that January’s jury award was “excessively exaggerated.”
“The Court must exercise its authority to prevent Ms. Carroll (sic) from enforcing this absurd judgment, which will not hold up on appeal,” Habba said.
Since the January ruling, a New York judge in a separate case has ordered Trump and his companies to pay $355 million in fines for a yearslong scheme to deceive banks and others with financial statements that inflated his wealth. With interest, he owes the state nearly $454 million.