Former President Donald Trump has been ordered by a federal jury to pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll, in addition to a separate $5 million sexual abuse and defamation judgment issued against him last year.
Before the jury entered the room, senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan asked the panel what the “M” on their form signified. The foreperson made clear it was millions.
The announcement inspired joy from Carroll, who embraced her attorneys at the plaintiff’s table.
She has been litigating against Trump since 2019, the year she went public with her allegations against the then-president in The Cut, with a passage of her book “What Do We Need Men For?” That passage related a decades-old encounter with the then-private citizen and real estate mogul, which a previous New York jury unanimously determined to have been sexual assault.
During Trump’s presidency, Carroll accused him of raping her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s — and then defaming her by insulting her when she came forward decades later. Trump denied the accusation, telling reporters: “She’s not my type,” sparking a federal defamation lawsuit. (In a later deposition, Trump mistook a photograph of Carroll with a picture of his ex-wife, Marla Maples.)
After New York passed the Adult Survivors Act, temporarily lifting the statute of limitations for sexual assault, Carroll filed a separate lawsuit under that statute — and additional defamation claims based on Trump’s continuing denials. That case went to federal court last spring before a separate jury, which awarded Carroll millions for sexual abuse and defamation after a few hours of deliberations.
Earlier this year, senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that the prior verdict left only one issue to decide in Carroll’s remaining lawsuit: How much more Trump must pay in damages for statements…
