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NEW YORK — A federal judge in New York declined Thursday to grant former President Donald Trump a new trial after a jury found him liable for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll and ordered him to pay $83.3 million in damages.
In January, a jury awarded Carroll $18.3 million in compensatory damages and $65 million in punitive damages after finding that Trump maliciously defamed her after she went public in 2019 with allegations that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s.
In an opinion published Thursday, District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan said that Trump’s arguments were meritless. He found that punitive damages awarded by the jury passed “constitutional muster” and that compensatory damages “were not excessive as a matter of New York law.”
“Contrary to the defendant’s arguments, Ms. Carroll’s compensatory damages were not awarded solely for her emotional distress; they were not for garden variety harms; and they were not excessive,” Kaplan wrote.
He added, “Mr. Trump’s malicious and unceasing attacks on Ms. Carroll were disseminated to more than 100 million people. They included public threats and personal attacks, and they endangered Ms. Carroll’s health and safety.
“The jury was entitled to conclude that Mr. Trump derailed the career, reputation, and emotional well-being of one of America’s most successful and prominent advice columnists and authors — to which she testified repeatedly — and award her $18.3 million in compensatory damages.”
Carroll shared her allegations against Trump in an excerpt published by New York magazine in 2019 from her then-upcoming memoir. Days later, Trump told reporters that he had never met Carroll and that she made up the claim to sell her book. He later added that she was “not my type.”
Last year, jurors found Trump liable for sexually assaulting Carroll in a dressing room at a luxury department store in New York City and defaming her in a 2022 social media post in which he claimed she was lying and that he did not know her. The jury ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million as part of the case.
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