Donald Trump must pay $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her when he was president after she accused him of rape and to stop him from continuing to drag her name through the mud, a Manhattan Federal Court jury decided Friday.
The panel of seven men and two women that heard the longtime advice columnist’s second case against Trump in the Manhattan courthouse handed down the damages verdict after deliberating for less than three hours.
They awarded Carroll $7.3 million for emotional harm stemming from two June 2019 statements by then-President Trump, which a judge previously ruled were defamatory, and $11 million for reputational harm.
Jurors also awarded Carroll a staggering $65 million in punitive damages to stop Trump from continuing to defame her, which he did until and throughout the short trial.
Carroll, who smiled at the jury after the verdict was delivered and tearfully hugged her lawyers, declined to comment on her way out of the courthouse as she posed for a group photo with her legal team.
In a statement, she called the verdict “a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down, and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep a woman down.”
Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, vowed to “immediately” appeal, saying, “This is wrong, but we are in the state of New York. We [had] a New York jury, and that is why we are seeing these witch hunts, these hoaxes, as he [Trump] calls them.”
During two days on the stand, Carroll, 80, emotionally described how Trump’s vitriol destroyed her sense of safety and left her in constant fear for her life while contending with a nonstop deluge of death threats and abuse from his supporters.
The former Elle magazine columnist testified about sleeping with a loaded gun at her upstate house, where she lives alone, sending her pit bull to patrol the grounds, hiring private security, and constantly checking to see if she’s being followed when she goes outside.
“He shattered my reputation,” Carroll said. “To have the president of the United States, one of the most powerful persons on earth, calling me a liar for three days and saying I’m a liar 26 times — I counted them — it ended the world that I had been living in.”
Trump stormed out during Carroll’s attorney’s closing argument on Friday morning. He was not present when the verdict was read.
The former president’s devastating defeat comes as he awaits a final verdict in his Manhattan Supreme Court civil fraud case, in which the New York attorney general seeks to recover at least $370 million in ill-gotten gains.
In a statement on the Truth Social site, Trump labeled the verdicts “Absolutely ridiculous!”
“I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party. Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon,” he wrote. The statement also repeated Trump’s comment to trial spectators after his testimony on Thursday: “THIS IS NOT AMERICA!”
Trump took the stand briefly in his own defense on Thursday, going under oath in court for the third time since leaving the White House. In just a few minutes of testimony, during which he wasn’t able to deny defaming or sexually assaulting Carroll, he managed to break the rules.
“She said something that I considered to be a false accusation,” Trump said on the witness stand. He added: “I just wanted to defend myself, my family and, frankly, the presidency.”
Trump put $5.5 million in escrow after losing another lawsuit Carroll brought against him at trial in May 2023. The jury in that case found the former president sexually assaulted Carroll at Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Ave. in 1996 and defamed her as “a complete con job” on Truth Social after his presidency in October 2022.
At the earlier trial last year, Carroll — whose resume also includes a stint as a daytime TV host — spent days on the stand, describing in devastating detail how Trump violently assaulted her in a changing room after they ran into each other in the luxury department store’s revolving doors and he invited her to pick out lingerie for his friend. Trump didn’t attend the first trial.
The older defamation lawsuit resolved by the jury on Friday primarily concerned things Trump said about Carroll when he was still in the White House — including that she was a liar, colluded with Democrats, and was “not my type.”
The case’s progress to trial was slowed for years by Trump’s effort to have it dismissed on the ground that he couldn’t be sued for things he said while he was president.
The Justice Department endorsed Trump’s legal argument that the presidency made him immune from Carroll’s defamation suit — and maintained that position after President Biden took office.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, who heard Carroll’s case, in October 2020 rejected the government’s effort to take Trump’s place as the defendant in the lawsuit — which would have ultimately killed Carroll’s suit because of its immunity. Kaplan found that disparaging a rape accuser as a liar was not part of a president’s official duties.
As Trump appealed that ruling, the government abandoned its effort to substitute him last summer after he was found liable at the first trial.
Carroll ultimately claimed victory against Trump with her second suit, filed moments after midnight on Thanksgiving 2022, among the first brought under New York’s Adult Survivor’s Act, which temporarily lifted the statute of limitations to bring sex crimes claims and allowed her to sue him for the decades-old assault.
The jury in the first case took three hours to determine that Carroll’s lawyers proved that Trump sexually assaulted her and defamed her on his social media platform post-presidency.
Trump’s lawyer at the first Carroll trial, Joe Tacopina, abruptly abandoned the ex-president in his appeal of the last verdict before the damages trial, telling MSNBC, “I had to follow my compass.”
New Jersey attorney Habba represented Trump at the second trial. At points during the trial, Habba infuriated Kaplan with what the judge deemed sloppy lawyering — to the point where Kaplan threatened her with jail on Friday if she disobeyed his orders again.
Kaplan also became infuriated with Trump during the trial, threatening to expel him on the second day for criticizing Carroll’s testimony in front of the jury.
“I would love it,” Trump brazenly told the judge.
In her closing argument, Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, asked jurors to award her $24 million in compensatory damages. She didn’t specify a number for punitive damages but asked the jury to aim “unusually high” in light of Trump’s refusal to stop defaming her. Even during the trial, Trump posted about Carroll on social media.
“You saw how he has behaved through this trial — you heard him. You saw him stand up and walk out of the courtroom while Ms. Kaplan was speaking. Rules don’t apply to Donald Trump,” Carroll’s attorney Shawn Crowley said in her rebuttal hours before the verdict.
“He gets to do whatever he wants and use his massive, powerful platform to keep ruining her life.”
The attorney asked the panelists to put an end to Trump’s abuse of Carroll once and for all.
“Donald Trump sexually assaulted her. He defamed her. He keeps defaming her. He is not the victim. This is her life. Help her take it back. Make him stop. Make him pay enough so that he will stop.”
