US appeals court upholds $83.3mn award against Trump for defaming Jean Carroll in sex assault case
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "US appeals court upholds $83.3mn award against Trump for defaming Jean Carroll in sex assault case")
E. Jean Carroll leaving a Manhattan federal appeals court after a hearing for an appeal brought by Donald Trump. Photograph: (AFP)
A federal appeals court refused to throw out an $83.3 million jury verdict against Trump for damaging the reputation of writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019 when he denied her rape claim. It rejected Trump’s argument that the Supreme Court’s decision extending presidential immunity shields him.
A federal appeals court in the US on Monday upheld the $83.3 million jury award against President Donald Trump for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2019, after she accused him of a decades-old rape in a Manhattan department store—an attack for which he was separately found liable of sexual abuse. The court rejected Trump’s argument that the Supreme Court’s decision last year of presidential immunity for official acts barred a finding of liability in Carroll’s lawsuit. The unsigned ruling by a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan was unanimous.
“We hold that the district court 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 US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote.
Trump assailed Carroll after she accused him of sex assault
The president had assailed Carroll after she accused him of the assault, continuing his verbal attacks on her on social media, at news conferences, and even during the trial, during which Carroll’s lawyers urged the jury to impose a large award in order to stop him.
A large portion of the award—$65 million—consisted of punitive damages after the jury found Trump had acted with malice.
In December, a different three-judge panel of the Second Circuit unanimously upheld a separate civil verdict Carroll won against Trump in 2023. In that case, a jury awarded her $5 million in damages after finding him liable for sexually abusing Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and defaming her in statements he made in 2022, after he was out of office.
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Carrol accused Trump of attacking her in department store dressing room
Carroll, 81, a former Elle magazine columnist, accused Trump of attacking her around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room.
Trump first denied her claim in June 2019, telling a reporter that Carroll was “not my type” and had concocted the story to sell a book called “What Do We Need Men For?”—a memoir about her life.
In June, Carroll released another memoir, “Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President”, about her legal battles against Trump.
