Appellate judges on Monday upheld an $83.3 million verdict against President Donald Trump for defaming E. Jean Carroll, accusing the president of “extraordinary and unprecedented conduct” in his statements against the journalist who accused him of sexual assault.
“The conduct here supports a significant punitive damages award — it involved malice and deceit, caused severe emotional injury, and continued over at least a five-year period,” reads the 70-page opinion by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
The White House declined to comment, referring the matter to Trump’s personal lawyers. Trump’s appellate counsel did not immediately reply to a NOTUS email.
The opinion is a rare personal setback for Trump, who has managed to dodge most of his legal travails. The half billion dollars he owed for civil bank fraud was recently reduced to nothing when a New York state appellate court disagreed over issues that came up at a trial over his persistent inflation of real estate assets. And shortly before he returned to the White House, a Manhattan judge decided to give him no punishment whatsoever after a criminal conviction for faking business records to cover up an extramarital affair with a porn star.
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But in this case, federal appellate judges reasoned that jurors were within their rights to slap Trump with a massive fine to teach him a lesson.
In January 2024, just as Trump was fighting to remain on the presidential ballot, a nine-person jury of New Yorkers took up a relatively narrow question: what it would take to stop Trump from continuing to defame Carroll, once a well-known women’s magazine advice columnist. Trump had already lost a $5 million trial in which a separate jury found him legally liable for sexually abusing her decades earlier, which he denied. The second jury had to consider whether to punish him for continuing to lambast her in public.
Jurors had to consider the megaphone power of the presidency, weighing the damage caused to Carroll’s long-built reputation as a journalist when Trump responded to her New York Magazine essay alleging sexual assault.
“I have no idea who she is. What she did is — it’s terrible, what’s going on. So it’s a total false accusation and I don’t know anything about her,” Trump said on June 22, 2019, on the White House lawn.
Two days later, he told The Hill, “I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?”
This second jury awarded Carroll $65 million in punitive damages, plus $11 million for a “reputation repair” program and another $7.3 million in other compensation.
During both trials, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan repeatedly threatened to eject Trump from the courthouse. The tension was high in the courtroom, where Trump would stare down Carroll and loudly complain about the proceedings — even in front of the jurors, breaking decorum and threatening to create a mistrial for improperly trying to intimidate or influence them.
On Monday, appellate judges found that Kaplan “did not err in any of the challenged rulings and that the jury’s damages awards are fair and reasonable.”
“The record makes clear that Trump acted with, at a minimum, reckless disregard for the truth,” appellate judges ruled.
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