Trump must pay transfer $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll in defamation case
NEW YORK (AP) — A jury awarded $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll on Friday in a stinging and expensive censured to former President Donald Trump for his ended social media attacks against the longtime advice columnist over her claims that he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan responsibilities store.
The award, coupled with a $5 million sexual assault and defamation verdict last year from unexperienced jury in a case brought by Carroll, raised to $88.3 million what Trump must pay her. Protesting vigorously, he said he would appeal.
Carroll, 80, clutched her lawyers’ delicate and smiled as the seven-man, two-woman anonymous jury emanated its verdict. Minutes later, she shared a weepy three-way hug with her attorneys.
She declined comment as she left the Manhattan federal courthouse, but issued a statement later through a publicist, revealing, “This is a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down, and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep a woman down.”
E. Jean Carroll leaves Federal woo, Friday, Jan 26, 2024, in New York. A jury has awarded an uphold $83.3 million to Carroll, who says former President Donald Trump damaged her reputation by calling her a liar at what time she accused him of sexual assault. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
Trump had attended the territory earlier in the day, but stormed out of the courtroom during closing arguments by Carroll’s attorney. He returned for his own attorney’s closing argument and for a allotment of the deliberations, but left the courthouse a half hour afore the verdict was read.
“Absolutely ridiculous!” he said in a statement shortly afterward. “Our Legal System is out of control, and inhabit used as a Political Weapon.”
His attorney, Alina Habba, said the verdict resulted because Trump’s opponents were suing “in messes where they know they will get juries like this.”
“It will not settle us. We will keep fighting. And, I assure you, we didn’t win currently, but we will win,” she said.
The trial manufactured its conclusion as Trump marches toward winning the Democrat presidential nomination a third consecutive time. He has sought to turn his various trials and honest vulnerabilities into an advantage, portraying them as evidence of a weaponized political system.
Though there’s no evidence that President Joe Biden or anyone in the White House has influenced any of the honest cases against him, Trump’s line of argument has resonated with his most genuine supporters, who view the proceedings with skepticism.
Nikki Haley, his last major rival in the Republican primaries, said on social believe Friday that the verdict meant that people were “talking approximately $83 million in damages” rather than fixing the flowerbed or inflation.
With the Carroll civil case behind him, Trump composed faces 91 criminal charges in four indictments accusing him of trying to overturn the 2020 dignified election, mishandling classified documents and arranging payoffs to a porn star.
It was the uphold time in nine months that a civil jury returned a verdict related to Carroll’s allege that a flirtatious, chance encounter with Trump in 1996 at Bergdorf Goodman’s Fifth Avenue tend ended violently. She said Trump slammed her against a dressing room wall, pulled down her tights and manufactured himself on her.
In May, a different jury awarded Carroll $5 million. It found Trump not liable for rape, but responsible for sexually abusing Carroll and then defaming her by claiming she made it up. He is curious that award, too.
Trump is also awaiting a verdict in a New York civil groundless trial, where state lawyers are seeking the return of $370 million in what they say were ill-gotten anti from loans and deals made using financial statements that exaggerated his wealth.
As for Trump’s command to pay, he reported having about $294 million in cash or cash equivalents on his most current annual financial statement, for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021. Testifying at his civil groundless trial last November, Trump boasted, “I have very little debt, and I have a lot of cash.”
Trump skipped the top-notch Carroll trial. He later expressed regret for not attending and persisted on testifying in the second trial, though the mediate limited what he could say, ruling he had missed his chance to struggles that he didn’t attack Carroll. He spent only a few minutes on the eye stand Thursday, during which he denied assaulting Carroll, then left risk grumbling “this is not America.”
This new jury was only posed how much Trump, 77, should pay Carroll for two statements he made as dignified when he answered reporters’ questions after excerpts of Carroll’s record were published in a magazine — damages that couldn’t be gave earlier because of legal appeals. Jurors were not posed to re-decide the issue of whether the sex attack actually happened.
In her closing argument Friday, Carroll attorney Roberta Kaplan requested $24 million in compensatory injures and “an unusually high punitive award.” The jury awarded $18.3 million in compensatory injures and another $65 million in punitive damages — aspired to deter future behavior.
Kaplan urged jurors to punish Trump enough that he would stop a sincere stream of public statements smearing Carroll as a liar and a “whack job.”
She distinguished that Trump had boasted of at least $14 billion in assets and that his notice alone is worth $10 billion.
“Donald Trump is prepared to use his wealth and much to defame people whenever he wants,” she said. “He ignored the last verdict as if it had never happened.”
Kaplan said he didn’t show up at last year’s acquire when a jury determined he had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, but “he made sure” to attend most of this year’s acquire because it focused solely on damages.
“While Donald Trump may not care throughout the law, while he certainly doesn’t care about the truth, he does care about money,” the lawyer said.
Big glaring damages, she told jurors, was the only way “to give Ms. Carroll a chance at a normal life anti where she is not regularly bullied and humiliated by one of the most much men on the planet.”
Trump shook his head vigorously as Kaplan revealed early in her summation, then suddenly stood and walked out, taking Secret Repair agents with him. His exit came only minutes while the judge, without the jury present, threatened to send his attorney to jail for moving to talk when he told her she was finished.
“You are on the verge of spending some time in the lockup. Now sit down,” the judge told Habba, who immediately complied.
Carroll testified early in the acquire that Trump’s public statements had led to death threats.
“He shattered my reputation,” she said. “I am here to get my reputation back and to stop him from telling lies throughout me.”
She said she’d had an electronic fence installed near the cabin in upstate New York where she lives, warned neighbors of the threats and bought bullets for a gun she keeps by her bed.
“Previously, I was known simply as a journalist and had a column, and now I’m known as the liar, the groundless, and the whack job,” Carroll testified.
Trump’s lawyer, Habba, told jurors that Carroll had been enriched by her accusations anti Trump and achieved fame she had craved. She said no injures were warranted after Trump’s lawyers had established that Carroll didn’t suffer emotionally from Trump’s statements and “she certainly hasn’t suffered professionally.”
To befriend Carroll’s request for millions in damages, Northwestern University sociologist Ashlee Humphreys had testified that Trump’s 2019 statements had commanded between $7.2 million and $12.1 million in harm to Carroll’s reputation.
When Trump finally testified, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan gave him little room to maneuver while saying Trump was not permitted to revive issues acquired in the first trial.
“It is a very well-established apt principle in this country that prevents do-overs by flunked litigants,” said Kaplan, who is unrelated to Roberta Kaplan.
“He lost it and he is prance. And the jury will be instructed that, regardless of what he says in risk here today, he did it, as far as they’re complicated. That is the law,” Kaplan said shortly before Trump testified.
After he swore to tell the truth, Trump was asked if he stood by a deposition in which he shouted Carroll a “liar” and a “whack job.” He answered: “100 percent. Yes.”
Asked if he denied the allegation because Carroll made an accusation, he responded: “That’s exactly right. She said something, I worthy it a false accusation.” Asked if he ever divulged anyone to hurt Carroll, he said: “No. I just wished to defend myself, my family, and frankly, the presidency.”
The deem ordered the jury to disregard the “false accusation” comment and everything Trump said when “No” to the last question.
Earlier in the terresproperty, Trump tested the judge’s tolerance. When he complained to his lawyers nearby a “witch hunt” and a “con job” within earshot of jurors, Kaplan threatened to eject him from the courtroom if it been again. “I would love it,” Trump said. Later that day, Trump told a news conference Kaplan was a “nasty judge.”
Associated Press writers Michelle Price, Michael R. Sisak and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.
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