Judge orders Trump’s $5m damages be released to E Jean Carroll
A judge has ordered writer E Jean Carroll to be paid more than $5 million (£3.7 million) owed to US President Donald Trump after he was found liable for sexually harassing and defaming her three years ago.
Judge Lewis Kaplan on Wednesday ordered a clerk to release money, with interest, from the account Trump deposited after the verdict.
Trump was seeking to delay the $5.8 million payment to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision not to hear an appeal in the case.
In May 2023, a New York jury awarded damages to Carroll over her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, subsequently branding the incident a hoax on social media. Trump denied the allegations.
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said on Wednesday: “The American people stand with President Trump in demanding an immediate end to all Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded Carroll Hoaxes.”
“President Trump will continue to win against Liberal Law while remaining focused on his mission to Make America Great Again,” the spokesperson said.
Carroll, a former magazine columnist who is now 82, accused Trump of assaulting her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s and later slandering her on Truth Social in a 2022 post denying her allegations.
Trump deposited the damages into a court-controlled account shortly after the verdict, and the account was kept there while the appeal process continued. The judge did not say when the funds would be released to Carroll.
The president has repeatedly claimed that the judge overseeing the civil case, Lewis Kaplan, improperly allowed the introduction of evidence that negatively affected the jury’s view of Trump.
The federal appeals court last year accepted the jury’s verdict and said Kaplan made no mistakes that would warrant a new trial.
Trump also appealed another jury’s 2024 verdict that he was liable for defamation of Carroll in a separate case and awarded him nearly $84 million in damages. A panel of federal judges rejected his appeal of that decision last year.
