MANHATTAN (CN) — Former president Donald Trump must pay writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages for mocking and dismissing her after she accused him of raping her decades earlier, a New York jury determined Friday.
The nine-person jury deliberated for just under three hours before returning a unanimous verdict on damages.
Trump was not present in the courtroom when the verdict was read.
The jury awarded Carroll $65 million in punitive damages and $18.3 million compensatory damages.
Carroll's civil defamation claims arise from then-President Trump’s June 2019 denials of her account that he raped her in a fitting room while the two were shopping together at the famed Bergdorf Goodman department store.
She first went public with the assault in her book “What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal” and an excerpt published in New York Magazine.
The trial’s verdict sheet asked jurors if they found "Did Ms. Carroll prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that 1. Ms. Carroll suffered more than nominal damages as a result of Mr. Trump’s publication of the June 21 and June 22, 2019, statements?"
Jurors were also asked to decide whether or not Trump acted “maliciously, out of hatred, ill will, or spite, vindictively, or in wanton, reckless, or willful disregard of Ms. Carroll’s rights?
Trump pledged to appeal the verdict.
"It will not deter us," Trump's lawyer Alina Habba said outside of the courthouse on Friday evening. "We will keep fighting. And I assure you, we didn't win today, but we will win because the record that was made in there gave us the most perfect record on appeal.
"I am proud to stand with President Trump, he showed up, he stood up, he took the stand and he faced this judge, and you know what, I’ll continue to do so with him," she added.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan already ruled this past September that Trump had acted with actual malice in making a series of false statements about Carroll in June 2019 when she came forward with accusations that Trump raped her decades earlier in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store.
Judge Kaplan handed the jury the case for deliberations at 1:40 p.m. Friday after closing arguments earlier in the day.
The Clinton-appointed judge found that a jury’s verdict in May 2023 in Carroll’s other lawsuit against Trump, finding him liable for the assault itself and defaming Carroll, controls in the defamation case at issue regarding several of Trump’s statements from June 2019 denying her account of the assault and characterizing her as liar and a fraud.
In the first trial, the jury awarded Carroll $2 million in compensatory damages for Trump sexually abusing her, plus $20,000 in punitive damages. On the defamation count, Trump will have to pay $1.7 million in damages for a reputation repair program plus $1 million in other damages.
Carroll testified at both trials, recalling last week the damage to her public reputation after Trump branded her a liar and an opportunist in 2019 when she first publicly accused him of raping her decades earlier.
"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, and I entered a new world,” she said Wednesday morning. “Now I’m known as a liar, a fraud and whackjob,” she testified.
Carroll says Trump had asked her to help him pick out a gift for a woman at the Manhattan department store in 1996, and the two made their way toward the store’s lingerie department, which was empty in the evening hours. After Trump tossed her a lacy bodysuit and asked her to try it on, she tossed it back, telling Trump it was his color. Trump then pushed her against the wall, pressed his mouth on hers, and raped her as she struggled to get away, Carroll said.
Trump, who continues to deny having ever met or assaulted Carroll, shuddered at the defense table on Friday afternoon while the judge instructed the jury that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll "by forcibly inserting his fingers into her vagina without her consent."
Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan — no relation to the judge — Kaplan told jurors during her summation it would require "an unusual high punitive damages award to have any hope of stopping Donald Trump,” and urged them to award $24 million in compensatory damages and much more in punitive damages.
Trump's New Jersey-based attorneys in the case, Habba and Michael Madaio, meanwhile told jurors that Carroll had not shown enough evidence at trial of causation between Trump's denial statements in June 2019 and the online harassment of Carroll by people who Habba said were "standing up for a man they admired" and had "independently" determined that Carroll was a liar.
"You are not here to pay Carroll for people who wrote mean tweets to her and they have to make a connection to the harm she says she suffered and Trump's two statements," Habba told jurors during closing arguments. "It's her burden and she has failed to meet that burden."
On Friday afternoon, Trump maligned Carroll’s civil case on social media as “another Biden Demanded Witch Hunt against his Political Opponent, funded and managed by Radical Left Democrats.”
“I am the only one who has been injured by this attempted EXTORTION,” he wrote on his TruthSocial website. “It is my duty to America to right this egregious wrong, a case which was started based on no facts, no dates, no nothing, just fabricated lies and political shenanigans.”
Trump, the first former U.S. president to be indicted, faces 91 criminal counts across four states and federal jurisdictions — in Georgia, Florida, New York and the District of Columbia — even as he enjoys front-runner standing in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race.
His trial in D.C. federal court over efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election is currently scheduled to begin March 4, 2024, but is likely to be delayed due to a pending appeal over Trump’s purported presidential immunity.
Meanwhile, the judge presiding over Trump’s $370 million civil business fraud trial in Manhattan state supreme court has promised a ruling by the end of the month.
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