American writer E. Jean Carroll has not only filed and won two lawsuits against the former president, Donald J. Trump, but was awarded $83.3 million in additional damages in the verdict from the January 2024 trial.
It all started back in mid-2019, when Carroll first sued then-President Donald Trump for defamation after claiming he raped her in the department store Bergdorf Goodman’s dressing room in the 1990s. Known as Carroll I, this lawsuit was presided over by Lewis Kaplan. The original defamation lawsuit lasted from 2019 to March 2023, facing delays because it was filed while Trump was serving as president.
The jury reached a unanimous decision on May 9, 2023, and did not find that Trump raped Carroll. But they agreed that he “sexually abused” her and that he defamed her when he denied her story. Carroll was awarded $5 million in total damages for both claims. Ultimately, her accusation was published in 2019 by New York Magazine as an excerpt of her memoir What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal. Trump denied the allegations and accused Carroll of inventing the story to sell more copies of her book.
While she used to receive hundreds of emails asking for advice to her column email, Carroll said she now received fewer than 10 a month. Instead, she received threats and insults. Carroll’s lawyer showed the jury several social media posts, messages, and emails sent to Carroll in the following days after Trump’s statements.
She then filed a second lawsuit, Carroll II, in November 2022. E. Jean Carroll amended her original defamation suit on May 22, 2023, to include additional comments Trump made following the verdict, both on a CNN town hall broadcast and Truth Social and added and an additional battery claim under the Adult Survivors Act (A New York law allowing sexual-assault victims to file civil suits beyond expired statutes of limitations).
Judge Lewis Kaplan presided over this case as well, clarifying that the jury had found that Trump had raped Carroll according to the common definition of the word, and issued a partial summary judgment regarding Carroll I, finding Trump liable for defamation via his 2019 statements. Kaplan ruled even before the trial that Trump had in fact defamed Carroll- the jury only had to decide how much Trump owed her. They awarded Carroll $65 million in punitive damages, $11 million for the damage to her reputation and another $7.3 million, for a grand total of 83.3 million dollars.
Following the decision, the Trump 2024 campaign also issued a statement arguing (without evidence) that the trial was a political weapon against him, and he disagrees with the verdict. On February 17th, at the Waterford Michigan rally, Trump said, “How about the one two weeks ago? A woman, I’m saying, ‘Who the hell is she? Who is the woman?’ It’s so unfair what’s happening in our country. Our court system is a mess. What’s happening in our country, they have to straighten it out.” This video accumulated over 620,000 views on X (Twitter) in just a few hours after it was shared by Journalist Aaron Rupar.
When confronted with how she was going to spend such an amount of money, Carroll says, “I’m not going to waste a cent of this. We’re going to do something good with it.” She added, “I can’t say what they are yet. We will all talk and come up with a great plan,” while acknowledging that, given Trump will appeal the damages, it could be years before she actually sees the money. “This win, more than any other thing, when we needed it the most- after we lost the rights over our own bodies in many states — we put out our flag in the ground on this one. Women won this one. I think it bodes well for the future.”
Besides having to pay the damages, whether or not this case will impact Trump’s current presidential campaign is still unknown. Trump is currently the front-runner among Republicans running for the 2024 election.
