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E Jean Carroll has called on Donald Trump to pay up after losing his bid for a new trial in a civil sexual assault lawsuit brought by the advice columnist.
In a decision released Wednesday, Judge Lewis Kaplan said the jury did not reach a “seriously erroneous result” when it found the former president liable for sexual assault and defamation and ordered him to pay $5 million.
The verdict was not a “judicial error” as Trump’s lawyers had claimed, Judge Kaplan wrote.
Ms Carroll’s lawyer, Robbie Kaplan, called on Trump to abide by the jury’s multi-million dollar verdict, adding that the writer hoped to hold him “accountable” in a second libel trial in January.
“Now that the court has denied Trump’s motion for a new trial or to reduce the verdict amount, E Jean Carroll looks forward to receiving the $5 million in damages the jury awarded him in Carroll II,” Kaplan said in a statement. . On Wednesday.
In May, a jury in Manhattan found Trump responsible for sexually assaulting the former elle columnist for Manhattan’s ritzy Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s, and smearing her by angrily calling the claims a “hoax.”
The jury ruled that Trump was not responsible for rape.
Trump appealed the verdict, claiming that the $2 million in compensatory damages awarded to Carroll for sexual assault were “excessive” because the jury found that he had not raped her.
He claimed the $2.7 million libel award was based on “pure speculation.”
Ms Carroll, 79, first revealed the details of the sexual assault in an excerpt from a book that was published in NY magazine in June 2019.
Donald Trump has lost a bid for a new trial
(Associated Press)
When Trump denied the claims and attacked her personally, she sued him for defamation in a case known as Carroll I.
Last week, the Justice Department said it no longer considered Trump immune from the first defamation lawsuit filed by Carroll when he was president.
The case is expected to proceed to trial in January.
Then, in 2022, Ms. Carroll sued the former president for sexual assault in a separate lawsuit after New York passed a law giving survivors a one-year window to hold their abusers accountable, regardless of when the assault occurred. .
E Jean Carroll leaves a Manhattan courthouse after a jury found the former president responsible for sexual assault and defamation
(Associated Press)
That lawsuit, dubbed Carroll II, went to trial earlier this year, where the writer testified that Trump took her to a dressing room on a deserted floor of Bergdorf Goodman, pushed her against a wall and sexually assaulted her.
Trump refused to testify in his own defense.
Judge Kaplan’s ruling is the latest setback for Trump as he battles a series of lawsuits and criminal cases.
In March, Trump became the first former or current president to face criminal charges when a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him on criminal charges over hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the days before. to the 2016 presidential elections.
He has pleaded not guilty.
In June, Trump was indicted in Miami federal court on 37 federal counts for his handling of classified documents, including national defense information, after leaving the White House. He has pleaded not guilty.
This week, Trump revealed that he had received a “target letter” from special counsel Jack Smith for an extensive Justice Department investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.