Court Orders Trump to Pay $83M to E. Jean Carroll After Appeal Fails
A U.S. federal appeals court has upheld a civil jury’s decision ordering President Donald Trump to pay $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll over defamatory remarks he made after she accused him of s£xual ass@ult.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday dismissed Trump’s challenge, ruling that the damages were “fair and reasonable.” The three-judge panel noted that Carroll endured hundreds of death threats and backed the trial judge’s finding that the “degree of reprehensibility” in Trump’s conduct was “remarkably high, perhaps unprecedented.”
Trump had argued that the award—especially the $65 million in punitive damages—was excessive and sought a new trial, citing the Supreme Court’s expansion of presidential immunity. But the panel rejected his claims, stressing that Trump’s “extraordinary and unprecedented” attacks on Carroll, 81, warranted the steep penalty given “the unique and egregious facts of this case.”
In response, Trump’s legal team blasted the ruling, denouncing it as part of the “political weaponization of the justice system” and labeling the case a “Democrat-funded travesty.”
The matter is now expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In its ruling, the 2nd Circuit said there is “ample evidence” that Trump was recklessly indifferent to Carroll’s health and safety after “castigating Ms. Carroll as a politically and financially motivated liar” and “insinuating that she was too unattractive for him to have sexually assaulted” and would “pay dearly” for speaking out.
The ruling centered on the second and far more expensive of two defamation awards issued to Carroll over Trump’s yearslong attacks on her character, which began after she accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of sexually assaulting her decades earlier at a Manhattan department store.
In her memoir and again at a 2023 trial, Carroll described how a chance encounter with Trump at Bergdorf Goodman’s Fifth Avenue in 1996 started with the two flirting as they shopped, then ended with a violent struggle inside a dressing room.
Carroll said Trump slammed her against a wall, pulled down her tights and forced himself on her.
At the initial trial, a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse, but concluded he hadn’t committed rape as defined under New York law.
Trump repeatedly denied the encounter took place and accused Carroll of making it up to help sell her book. He also said Carroll was “not my type.”
The 2023 jury awarded Carroll $5 million to compensate her for both the alleged attack and statements Trump made denying after his first presidency ended that it had happened.
After that first verdict, the court conducted a second trial with a new jury for the sole purpose of deciding damages for statements Trump made attacking Carroll’s character and truthfulness while he was president in 2019.
On Monday, the appeals court agreed, saying the trial judge “did not err in any of the challenged rulings and that the jury’s duly rendered damages awards were reasonable in light of the extraordinary and egregious facts of this case.”
The 2nd Circuit noted that Trump continued his attacks against Carroll for at least five years, making them “more extreme and frequent as the trial approached.”
“He also continued these same attacks during the trial itself,” the appeals court said. “In one such statement, issued two days into the trial, Trump proclaimed that he would continue to defame Carroll ‘a thousand times.’”
