Trump and his lawyers have vowed to appeal
For years, Donald Trump has insulted E. Jean Carroll, saying the advice columnist fabricated a sexual abuse allegation against him to sell a book.
Will Trump keep that up, now that he has been hit with an $83.3 million defamation lawsuit?
A jury ruled Friday that Trump maliciously damaged Carroll’s reputation in 2019 after she made her allegations public. Jurors awarded her $18 million to compensate for the personal damages she suffered, then added $65 million to punish Trump and perhaps prevent him from pursuing her on social media.
Another jury concluded last May that Trump was responsible for sexually assaulting Carroll in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in 1996. Those jurors awarded Carroll $5 million. If both verdicts stand, Trump would owe her a total of $88.3 million.
Trump and his lawyers have vowed to appeal.
A look at the verdict and where the case could go:
THE ACCUSATION
Carroll said she was shopping at the Bergdorf Goodman store on Fifth Avenue in 1996 when she encountered Trump, who lived nearby. She said they recognized each other. At the time, Carroll had a column in Elle magazine and was the host of a cable television talk show called Ask E. Jean.
In court testimony and in her memoir, Carroll said she and Trump went to the store’s lingerie department and then to a dressing room, trying to persuade each other to try on a lace item. When they entered the locker room, she said, Trump pushed her against a wall, pulled down her panties and sexually assaulted her. Carroll said she broke away and ran.
After she wrote about the alleged meeting in 2019, Trump, who has since been elected president, told reporters that he had no idea who Carroll was, that her accusation was “completely false” and that she was motivated by a desire to make books to sell.
THE FIRST TRIALCarroll sued Trump for defamation in 2019, saying his statements about her were false and damaged her reputation. That claim was stalled for years over the legal question of whether Trump had fulfilled his duties as president by denying the allegations. Trump claimed that the presidency protects him from liability in the defamation lawsuit.
In the meantime, New York changed its law to give sexual assault survivors a new chance to sue over past attacks. Carroll was among the first to take advantage, filing a new legal claim against Trump, alleging he raped her. She also complained about things he said about her after she left the White House.
A jury heard testimony in that trial last year and found that while Carroll had not proven she had been raped, Trump had sexually assaulted her under the New York definition of that crime.
The jury awarded Carroll $2 million for the abuse and nearly $3 million for Trump’s public comments about her, which she said were defamatory and therefore did not protect free speech.
With the main legal issues resolved, one issue remained: Was Carroll also damaged by Trump’s comments while still in the White House.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled that a new trial would be necessary to decide that claim, but that trial did not have to revisit whether Trump had attacked Carroll and whether the things he said about her were defamatory. This trial would decide how much more Trump owed Carroll for the things he said about her on June 21 and 22, 2019.
Trump and his lawyers were outraged that they were not given the chance to make a new argument that he was innocent, but Kaplan said they had already lost that battle.
It is a very well-established legal principle in this country that prevents takeovers by disappointed litigants, Kaplan told the lawyers on the day Trump testified in the second trial. ‘He has lost it and is bound. And the jury will be instructed that no matter what he says here in court today, he did it, as far as they’re concerned. That’s the law.’
WHAT’S NEXT?Trump’s legal team is appealing the verdict in the first case and has vowed to appeal the second case as well.
It won’t deter us. We will keep fighting. And I tell you, we didn’t win today, but we will win,” Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba said.
His team, among other things, wants higher courts to rule that Trump was within his rights to vigorously deny Carroll’s allegations and suggest she had ulterior motives.
Everyone has the right to defend themselves,” Habba said.
Trump’s lawyers also dispute Kaplan’s ruling that the jury in the second trial did not have to re-examine whether Trump was liable for sexual abuse, and that the judge unfairly limited what Trump’s lawyers could do in front of the jury say.
The appeal goes to a jury in New York. The appeals could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices can consider them.
In the meantime, Trump has placed more than $5.5 million in an escrow account to potentially cover the costs of the first judgment while appeals are pending.
Carroll could file a new lawsuit over any new comment. New trials might have to be held where juries could impose additional damages.
The $88.3 million in judgments against Trump are actually less than what some of his supporters have faced in recent defamation cases.
A jury decided last year that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Trump ally who tried to keep the then-president in power after losing the 2020 election, owed $148 million to two former election workers in Georgia for spreading a conspiracy theory about them. Juries in Texas and Connecticut have sentenced Infowars host Alex Jones to pay $1.5 billion in defamation for promoting a false claim that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.
Unlike Giuliani and Jones, Trump may have the financial resources to make a major judgment call. He reported having about $294 million in cash or cash equivalents in his most recent financial statements, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021. That’s in addition to the value of his real estate, which Trump claims is worth billions of dollars. .
Still, Trump faces other potential financial liabilities. He is awaiting a verdict in a civil fraud lawsuit in which New York state has asked that he forfeit $370 million in what officials say are ill-gotten gains from loans and deals made using financial statements that exaggerate his wealth.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
First print: January 27, 2024 | 11:22 PM IST