Donald Trump has been ordered to pay $83 million to the writer E Jean Carroll after he called her a liar for accusing him of sexual assault.
The jury awarded Carroll $7.3 million in compensatory damages, $11 million for costs to repair her reputation and $65 million in punitive damages – more than triple the amount her lawyers had sought.
In 2023 Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll.
‘I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party’, he wrote on Truth Social.
‘Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon. They have taken away all First Amendment Rights. THIS IS NOT AMERICA!’
Trump stormed out of the New York court room while Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan was delivering her closing arguments.
Carroll, 80, was awarded the damages for denials Trump made in 2019 when he said Carroll should ‘pay dearly’ for claiming he had raped her in the mid-1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.
Trump’s lead attorney Alina Habba attacked the decision, jurors and ‘corrupt’ restrictions the defence had been put under by the court.
Habba said they would appeal immediately. ‘We will set aside that ridiculous jury and I just want to remind you all in one thing: I will continue with President Trump to fight for everybody’s First Amendment right to speak. Everybody has a right to defend themselves when they are wrongfully accused’.
‘This is wrong, this is wrong, but we are in the state of New York, before a New York jury, and that is why we are seeing these witch hunts.’
Trump’s unexpected departure prompted Judge Lewis Kaplan to speak up, briefly interrupting the closing argument to say: ‘The record will reflect that Mr Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom’. Trump did not return.
Trump testified that he stood ‘100 per cent’ behind comments he made in an October 2002 deposition in which he denied Carroll’s accusations, calling her ‘sick and a ‘whack job’.