A federal judge on Thursday upheld the verdict and award of more than $83m to the writer E Jean Carroll in a defamation case against Donald Trump after he called her a liar for accusing him of sexually assaulting her.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, a senior district judge on the US district court for the southern district of New York, denied Trump’s motion for a new trial and affirmed that Carroll suffered harm caused by Trump’s 2019 public statements.
“Mr Trump’s argument is entirely without merit both as a matter of law and as a matter of fact,” Kaplan wrote in his opinion released on Thursday.
Carroll, a journalist and advice columnist, first sued Trump in 2019 for sexually abusing her in a New York department store changing room around early 1996. A jury awarded her with $5m in compensatory and punitive damages last year.
Less than a year later, Carroll won a separate defamation lawsuit against the former president after he accused her of lying about the sexual abuse and participating in a political operative. She filed suit over these denials in 2019, claiming they ruined her reputation.
“I’ve never met this person in my life. She is trying to sell a new book – that should indicate her motivation,” Trump wrote at the time. “It should be sold in the fiction section.”
In January, a New York City jury awarded Carroll $18.3m in compensatory damages, $65m in punitive retribution, along with compensatory damages of $18.3m – $11m to fund a reputational repair campaign paid by Trump.
Amid financial woes, a judge approved Trump’s $92m bond in the Carroll case, insulating the former president from any effort to collect the judgment while he appealed the verdict.
This week’s development comes at the same time the former president faces his first criminal trial in the series of indictments against him.
A Manhattan court will decide whether Trump’s efforts to cover up an alleged affair with the adult film star Stormy Daniels, which he feared would damage his bid for the White House, were illicit.
