Because of defamation
Trump must pay author $83 million
January 26, 2024, 10:52 p.m
For the second time, author E. Jean Carroll is bringing Donald Trump to court. After being convicted of rape the first time, he is now facing defamation. A jury awarded the plaintiff significantly more compensation than she had asked for.
Former US President Donald Trump has been sentenced to a further compensation payment of $83.3 million (around €77 million) in a second defamation trial in New York. This was decided by a jury, as the US media unanimously reported. It was the second civil lawsuit brought by 80-year-old US author E. Jean Carroll against Trump. The amount of punitive damages and damages now awarded far exceeds the more than ten million dollars demanded by Carroll.
At the end of the first trial in May, a New York jury found it proven that Trump had attacked Carroll in a luxury New York department store in 1996, sexually abused him and later slandered him. The jury then awarded the writer compensation of five million dollars (around 4.65 million euros).
Before the start of the second trial, Judge Lewis Kaplan had ruled that Trump’s later comments were defamatory. The jury now only had to decide on the amount of compensation that Trump had to pay.
Trump appeared in person several times in the second trial – unlike in the first – and attracted attention through numerous commenting opinions, which is why the judge had threatened to exclude him in the meantime. The 77-year-old is considered the Republicans’ most promising candidate in the presidential elections scheduled for November. However, he currently has to deal with the courts in numerous different cases. Trump often uses the court dates as a kind of campaign event.