[ad_1]
 "donald trump")
Trump and his lawyers have promised to appeal
For years, Donald Trump hurled insults at E. Jean Carroll, saying the advice columnist made up a sexual assault allegation against him to sell a book.
Will Trump continue like this, now that he has received an $83.3 million defamation judgment?
A jury found on Friday that Trump had maliciously damaged Carroll’s reputation in 2019 after she went public with her allegations. The jury awarded her $18 million to compensate for the personal harm she suffered, then added $65 million more to punish Trump and perhaps prevent him from continuing to pursue her on social media.
Last May, a different jury found that Trump was responsible for sexually abusing Carroll in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in 1996. Those juries awarded Carroll $5 million. If both sentences are upheld, Trump would owe him a total of $88.3 million.
Trump and his lawyers have vowed to appeal.
A look at the verdict and where the case could go from here:
THE ACCUSATION
Carroll said he was shopping at the Bergdorf Goodman store on Fifth Avenue in 1996 when he ran into Trump, who lived nearby. She said they recognized each other. At the time, Carroll had a column in Elle magazine and was the host of a cable television talk show called Ask E. Jean.”
In her court testimony and in her memoir, Carroll said she and Trump went to the store’s lingerie section and then to a dressing room as each tried to persuade the other to try on a lace garment. When they entered the dressing room, she said, Trump pushed her against a wall, pulled down her socks and sexually assaulted her. Carroll said she broke free and ran.
After writing about the alleged encounter in 2019, Trump, who by then had been elected president, told reporters that he had no idea who Carroll was, that her accusation was “totally false” and that she was motivated by a desire to sell books. .
Meanwhile, New York changed its law to give survivors of sexual abuse a new opportunity to sue for attacks that occurred in the distant past. Carroll was one of the first people to take advantage and filed a new lawsuit against Trump alleging that he had raped her. He also filed a lawsuit over things he had said about her after leaving the White House.
A jury heard testimony in that lawsuit last year and concluded that while Carroll had not proven she had been raped, under New York’s definition of that crime, Trump had sexually abused her.
The jury awarded Carroll $2 million for the abuse and nearly $3 million for Trump’s public comments about her, which she said were defamatory and therefore did not protect free speech.
With the major legal issues resolved, one question remained: whether Carroll had also been harmed by Trump’s comments while still in the White House.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled that a new trial would be necessary to decide that claim, but that trial did not need to re-examine the question of whether Trump had assaulted Carroll or whether things he had said about her were defamatory. . This trial would decide how much more, if anything, he owed her, Trump owed Carroll for the things he had said about her on June 21 and 22, 2019.
Trump and his lawyers were outraged that they had not had a chance to make a new argument that he was innocent, but Kaplan said they had already lost that fight.
It’s a well-established legal principle in this country that prevents disappointed litigants from trying again, Kaplan told lawyers the day Trump testified in the second trial. “He lost it and he’s bound. And the jury will be instructed that regardless of what he says here in court today, he did it, as far as they’re concerned. That’s the law.”
It won’t deter us. We will continue fighting. And I assure you that today we did not win, but we will win,” said Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba.
Among other things, her team wants higher courts to rule that Trump was within his rights to vigorously deny Carroll’s allegations and suggest she had ulterior motives.
“Everyone has the right to defend themselves,” Habba said.
Trump’s lawyers are also challenging Kaplan’s ruling that the jury in the second trial did not need to review whether Trump was responsible for sexual assault, and that the judge unfairly limited what Trump’s lawyers could say to the jury.
Appeals will be presented before a panel of judges in New York. Appeals could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court for judges to consider.
Meanwhile, Trump has put more than $5.5 million in an escrow account to potentially cover the cost of the first verdict while appeals play out.
Carroll could file a new lawsuit for each new comment. Potentially, new trials would have to be held in which jurors could accumulate additional damages.
The $88.3 million in judgments against Trump are actually less than what some of his supporters have faced in recent defamation cases.
Last year, a jury decided that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Trump ally who tried to keep the then-president in power after he lost the 2020 election, owed $148 million to two former Georgia election workers for spreading a conspiracy theory about them. Juries in Texas and Connecticut have hit Infowars host Alex Jones with $1.5 billion in defamation judgments for promoting a false claim that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.
Unlike Giuliani and Jones, Trump could have the financial resources to pay a huge sentence. He reported that he had about $294 million in cash or cash equivalents in his most recent annual financial statement, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021. That’s in addition to the value of his real estate assets, which Trump says are worth thousands of millions of dollars. .
Still, Trump faces other potential financial liabilities. He is awaiting a verdict in a civil fraud trial, in which New York state has asked him to forfeit $370 million in what officials say were ill-gotten gains from loans and deals made using financial statements that exaggerated his wealth.
(Only the title and image of this report may have been modified by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
First published: January 27, 2024 | 23:22 IS
