A jury in New York on Friday ordered former US president and 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump to pay US$83.3 million to compensate writer E. Jean Carroll, whom he was found to have sexually assaulted and defamed.
The civil order, which prompted an audible gasp in the federal court, far exceeds the more than US$10 million in damages for defamation that Carroll had sought.
Trump lashed out almost immediately, calling the verdict “ridiculous” in a statement and promising to appeal.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The jury reached its decision after slightly less than three hours of deliberations.
Trump had been in court earlier, storming out at one point, but subsequently returning for closing arguments. He was not in court when the level of compensatory and punitive damages were read out by a court clerk.
“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,” Carroll said in a statement.
A juror exchanged a smile with Carroll as the nine men and women left the courtroom after the judge encouraged them to protect their privacy.
“It’s clear to me ... you paid attention,” Judge Lewis Kaplan told the jury following the verdict.
The order was comprised of US$65 million in punitive damages after the jury found Trump acted maliciously in his many public comments about Carroll, US$7.3 million in compensatory damages and US$11 million for a reputational repair program.
“I was not surprised [by the award] partly because his egregious misbehavior during the trial could actually have alienated the jury,” University of Richmond School of Law professor Carl Tobias said. Trump “is unlikely to prevail on appeal, because the [appeal] judges have great respect for Judge Kaplan, who is a very experienced federal jurist.”
Trump — whom a jury found liable for sexually assaulting Carroll in a separate federal civil case in New York — used his Truth Social platform to fire off a spate of insulting messages attacking Carroll, the trial and the judge, whom he called “an extremely abusive individual.”
“We were stripped of every defense — every single defense — before we walked in there,” Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba said outside the court. “I am proud to stand with president Trump... We will immediately appeal.”
Trump, 77, briefly took the stand on Thursday to deny he instructed anyone to harm Carroll with his statements.
During Trump’s testimony, Kaplan limited him to three questions from his lawyers, to which he could only answer “yes” or “no” — a precaution taken to prevent the Republican leader from returning to his custom of disparaging the court or Carroll in public.
“This is not America,” Trump said as he left the courtroom following his short appearance.
Trump has used the case, as well as others he faces, to generate heated media coverage and to fuel his claims of being victimized as he campaigns for a return to the White House in November’s election.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS