Judge upholds $83m E Jean Carroll defamation verdict against Trump [View all]

Source: The Guardian

Thu 25 Apr 2024 14.32 EDT


A federal judge on Thursday upheld the verdict and award of more than $83m to the writer E Jean Carroll in a defamation case against Donald Trump after he called her a liar for accusing him of sexually assaulting her.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, a senior district judge on the US district court for the southern district of New York, denied Trump’s motion for a new trial and affirmed that Carroll suffered harm caused by Trump’s 2019 public statements. “Mr Trump’s argument is entirely without merit both as a matter of law and as a matter of fact,” Kaplan wrote in his opinion released on Thursday.

Carroll, a journalist and advice columnist, first sued Trump in 2019 for sexually abusing her in a New York department store changing room around early 1996. A jury awarded her with $5m in compensatory and punitive damages last year.

Less than a year later, Carroll won a separate defamation lawsuit against the former president after he accused her of lying about the sexual abuse and participating in a political operative. She filed suit over these denials in 2019, claiming they ruined her reputation.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/25/e-jean-carroll-trump-defamation