Trump’s angry reaction to verdict in E. Jean Carroll case: vows to appeal
Donald Trump on his social media platform decried the $83.3 million in damages a jury awarded E Jean Carroll for defaming her after denying he raped her.
E Jean Carroll, who accused Donald Trump of raping her in a department store changing room, has won her second defamation trial against the former president. Last spring a civil trial jury found that the former president had sexually violated Carroll and ordered him to pay her $5 million in damages for defaming her in 2022 for a second time.
On Friday, after less than three hours of deliberation in Manhattan, a second jury found that in 2019 the then-president had previously defamed her with malice when he denied her accusations. The nine-person jury awarded Carroll a total of $83.3 million in damages on top of those awarded last year.
The decision was well in excess of what she and her lawyers had been seeking. Trump quickly responded to the verdict on his social media platform Truth Social decrying the decision calling it “Absolutely ridiculous!”
Trump’s angry reaction to verdict in E. Jean Carroll case: vows to appeal
“Aboslutely ridiculous! I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party,” the current GOP frontrunner to face President Joe Biden in the 2024 elections fumed on social media. “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!”
When Carroll testified she explained how the then-President Trump called her a liar in 2019 for saying that he had raped her several years prior in a department store “it ended the world that [she] had been living in. And [she] entered a new world.”
That was one in which she began receiving scores if not hundreds of messages attacking her and threatening her with violence on a daily basis. Several of those messages were read out to the jury.
The jury awarded her $7.3 million in compensatory damages, $11 million to repair her reputation and $65 million in punitive damages for a total of $83.3 million.