Trump-Carroll Defamation Trial: Jury Orders Trump to Pay Carroll $83.3 Million for Defamation (2024)

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The jury orders Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million after years of insults.

On Friday, Mr. Trump had already left the courtroom for the day when the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, called in the nine-member jury shortly after 4:30 p.m., warning the lawyers, “We will have no outbursts.” The verdict was delivered nine minutes later to utter silence in the courtroom.

In addition to the $65 million, jurors awarded Ms. Carroll $18.3 million in compensatory damages for her suffering. Mr. Trump’s lawyers slumped in their seats as the dollar figures were read aloud. The jury was dismissed, and Ms. Carroll, 80, embraced her lawyers. Minutes later, she walked out of the courthouse arm in arm with her legal team, beaming for the cameras.

“This is a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep a woman down,” Ms. Carroll said in a statement, thanking her lawyers effusively.

Mr. Trump, who had walked out of the courtroom earlier during the closing argument by Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, said in a Truth Social post that the verdict was “absolutely ridiculous.”

“Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon,” he said, pledging to appeal. “They have taken away all First Amendment Rights.”

Notably, he did not attack Ms. Carroll.

Outside the courthouse, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, combined complaints about how Judge Kaplan had handled the case with sloganeering, echoing Mr. Trump’s claims that he was being ill-treated by a corrupt system. “We did not win today,” she told reporters, “but we will win.”

Mr. Trump’s appeal will likely keep Ms. Carroll from receiving the money she is owed anytime soon.

Ms. Carroll’s lead lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said the verdict “proves that the law applies to everyone in our country, even the rich, even the famous, even former presidents.”

The verdict vastly eclipsed the $5 million a separate jury awarded Ms. Carroll last spring after finding that Mr. Trump had sexually abused her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and had defamed her in a Truth Social post in October 2022. The verdict came after Mr. Trump attended nearly every day of the latest trial, and testified, briefly, this week.

Judge Kaplan, who presided over both trials, had ruled that the jury’s findings last May would carry over to the current one, limiting the second jury’s focus solely to damages. Mr. Trump, who is running for president again, was not allowed to stray beyond that issue in his testimony. On Thursday, the judge, out of the jury’s presence, asked Ms. Habba for a preview of that testimony. “I want to know everything he is going to say,” the judge said.

In the end, Mr. Trump, by his actions and words, was his own worst enemy. During the trial, he attacked Ms. Carroll online and insulted her last week at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. Inside the courtroom, the judge warned Mr. Trump that he might be excluded after Ms. Carroll’s lawyers complained that he was muttering “con job” and “witch hunt” loudly enough for jurors to hear.

In their closing arguments on Friday, Ms. Carroll’s lawyers, Ms. Kaplan and Shawn G. Crowley, used Mr. Trump’s presence in court as a weapon against him. Ms. Crowley said his actions demonstrated his belief that he could get away with anything, including continuing to defame Ms. Carroll.

“You saw how he has behaved through this trial,” Ms. Crowley said. “You heard him. You saw him stand up and walk out of this courtroom while Ms. Kaplan was speaking. Rules don’t apply to Donald Trump.”

There could be more financial damage to come for Mr. Trump. He is still awaiting the outcome of a civil fraud trial brought by New York’s attorney general that concluded this month. The attorney general, Letitia James, has asked a judge to levy a penalty of about $370 million on Mr. Trump.

The former president is also contending with four criminal indictments, at least one of which is expected to go to trial before the November election. His civil cases will soon be behind him, but the greater threat — 91 felony charges, in all — still looms.

The verdict on Friday provided a coda to two weeks of political success for Mr. Trump. He completed an Iowa and New Hampshire sweep in the first two presidential nominating states of 2024 and cemented himself as the likely Republican nominee.

He has used his courtroom appearances as a fundamental element of his campaign, painting himself as a political martyr targeted on all sides by Democratic law enforcement officials, as well as by Ms. Carroll. His loss to her will most likely sting for some time.

During the trial, Ms. Carroll testified that Mr. Trump’s repeated taunts and lashing out had mobilized many of his supporters. She said she had faced an onslaught of attacks on social media and in her email inbox that frightened her and “shattered” her reputation as a well-regarded advice columnist for Elle magazine.

Ms. Carroll told the jury she had been attacked on Twitter and Facebook. “I was living in a new universe,” she said.

The trial took about five days over two weeks, and was marked by repeated clashes between Mr. Trump’s lawyers and Judge Kaplan, who is known for his command of the courtroom. The former president’s testimony was highly anticipated for days, but on Thursday, he was on the stand for less than five minutes, and his testimony was notable for how little he ended up saying.

On Friday, Ms. Kaplan, who is not related to the judge, asked the jury in a crisp and methodical summation to award Ms. Carroll enough money to help her repair her reputation and compensate her for the emotional harm Mr. Trump’s attacks had inflicted.

Ms. Kaplan also emphasized that Mr. Trump could afford significant punitive damages, which come into play when a defendant’s conduct is thought to have been particularly malicious. She cited a video deposition excerpt played for the jury in which he estimated that his brand alone was worth “maybe $10 billion” and that the value of various of his real estate properties was $14 billion.

“Donald Trump is worth billions of dollars,” Ms. Kaplan told the jury.

“The law says that you can consider Donald Trump’s wealth as well as his malicious and spiteful continuing conduct in making that assessment,” Ms. Kaplan said, adding, “Now is the time to make him pay for it, and now is the time to make him pay for it dearly.”

Mr. Trump was not present to hear her. After scoffing, muttering and shaking his head throughout the first few minutes of Ms. Kaplan’s closing argument, Mr. Trump rose from the defense table without saying anything, turned and left the 26th-floor courtroom. Ms. Kaplan continued to address the jury as if the stark breach of decorum had not occurred.

“The record will reflect that Mr. Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom,” Judge Kaplan said.

Mr. Trump returned about 75 minutes later, when his lawyer Ms. Habba began her summation.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers cast Ms. Carroll as a fame-hungry writer who was trying to raise a diminishing profile when she first made her accusation against Mr. Trump in a 2019 book excerpt in New York magazine about an encounter she has said traumatized her for decades.

Ms. Habba, her voice loud and heavy, her tone mocking and sarcastic, argued that Ms. Carroll’s reputation, far from being damaged, had improved as a result of the president’s statements. And she said Ms. Carroll’s lawyers had not proved that the deluge of threats and defamatory statements the writer received were a response to Mr. Trump’s statements.

“No causation,” Ms. Habba thundered, adding, “President Trump has no more control over the thoughts and feelings of social media users than he does the weather.”

Ms. Crowley, in an animated and passionate rebuttal to Ms. Habba, rejected her contention that Mr. Trump’s statements did not prompt the threats Ms. Carroll received. “There couldn’t be clearer proof of causation,” Ms. Crowley said.

The jurors remained attentive during the closing arguments. One watched Ms. Kaplan intently during much of her summation; others alternated between looking at the lawyers, staring at the exhibits on the screens and taking notes.

During the summations, Mr. Trump’s account on his Truth Social website made about 16 posts in 15 minutes mostly attacking Judge Kaplan and Ms. Carroll, with his familiar insults — the kinds of insults that have now become very costly.

Ms. Kaplan said in her closing argument that the only thing that could make Mr. Trump stop his attacks would be to make it too expensive for him to continue.

The jury, in its verdict, appears to have agreed.

Olivia Bensimon, Anusha Bayya, Maggie Haberman, Shane Goldmacher and Michael Gold contributed reporting.

Trump will not have to pay the full $83.3 million until all his appeals are exhausted.

And while he is waiting for an appellate court to rule, Mr. Trump need not cut Ms. Carroll a check.

Yet the former president is still on the hook to pay something — possibly a sizable sum — while he waits.

Mr. Trump can pay the $83.3 million to the court, which will hold the money while the appeal is pending. This is what he did last year when a jury ordered him to pay Ms. Carroll $5.5 million in a related case.

Or, Mr. Trump can try to secure a bond, which will save him from having to pay the full amount up front.

A bond might require him to pay a deposit and offer collateral, and would come with interest and fees. It would also require Mr. Trump to find a financial institution willing to lend him a large sum of money at a time when he is in significant legal jeopardy.

Although Mr. Trump likes to boast of his billions, much of his wealth is linked to the value of his properties, and he is loath to part with vast sums of cash at once.

And when it comes to his varied legal expenses — of which there are many — he tries to avoid spending his own money at all. Mr. Trump has tapped his political action committee’s coffers to pay for his own legal fees and other expenses stemming from his criminal indictments and civil trials.

Yet $83.3 million eclipses the amount in his political accounts. The verdict on Friday will require Mr. Trump to reach into his own pocket.

Still, if the verdict survives Mr. Trump’s appeals, Ms. Carroll should eventually be paid, according to Bruce Green, director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics at Fordham University.

“He’s the rare defendant with an $83 million verdict against him who actually has the money,” Mr. Green said. “Wherever this lands, she should be able to collect.”

He has enough cash to cover the verdict in various accounts, a person close to him said. In recent years, Mr. Trump has unloaded several assets, including his Washington hotel, which sold for $375 million.

Yet the verdict on Friday is not the only payout upcoming for Mr. Trump. The New York attorney general is seeking a $370 million penalty from the former president and his family business as part of a civil fraud trial that wrapped up this month.

The judge in that case is expected to issue a decision in the coming weeks. If Mr. Trump is ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, it is unclear whether he would have to sell another asset to make a payment like that.

Claire Fahy contributed reporting.

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“I am so proud to stand with President Trump,” Alina Habba says, when asked whether she regretted representing him. “But I am not proud to stand up with whatever happened in that courtroom.”

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Carroll held hands with her attorneys, Roberta Kaplan and Shawn Crowley, as the jurors walked out of the courtroom. She nodded at some of the jurors and a few jurors nodded back. After the jury left, Carroll, Kaplan and Crowley shared an emotional hug, before embracing other members of their legal team.

Many of Carroll’s friends and family were in the audience when the verdict came down. Some of them were emotional, including Carroll’s sister, who at one point wiped away a tear.

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Judge Lewis Kaplan is known for his intellect and command of the courtroom.

Judge Kaplan, who was appointed to the federal bench in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, also oversaw a lawsuit filed against Prince Andrew, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, by a woman who had accused him of raping her when she was a teenage victim of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Last year, Andrew paid an undisclosed sum to settle the case.

The judge, 79, is known for his intellect, independence and command of the courtroom — an issue that has come up in the current case, when he warned Mr. Trump that he could forfeit his right to attend the proceedings if he is disruptive.

Judge Kaplan’s patience has been tested before. During the case against the FTX founder, he revoked Mr. Bankman-Fried’s bail and sent him to jail after prosecutors said they were concerned that he was trying to intimidate witnesses.

Judge Kaplan is a graduate of Harvard Law School and was a partner at the Manhattan law firm Paul, Weiss before joining the bench.

After walking out, Trump came back to hear himself defended.

But as Mr. Trump’s own lawyer, Alina Habba, prepared to deliver her own argument, the former president reappeared in the courtroom to listen as she championed him.

He sat silently with his hands clasped on the table as Ms. Habba attacked the plaintiff, E. Jean Carroll. He occasionally turned his head to watch his lawyer, and seemed animated only when the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, ruled against his side.

At one point, Ms. Habba played down the seriousness of threats of harm made to Ms. Carroll, noting that she herself has received similar ones. Judge Kaplan warned Ms. Habba that the argument was inappropriate, causing Mr. Trump to shake his head in apparent disgust.

At the same time, on social media, his account attacked Ms. Carroll and Judge Kaplan, saying that the judge had “so far been unable to see clearly because of his absolute hatred of Donald J. Trump (ME!).”

Ms. Habba was followed by one of Ms. Carroll’s lawyers, Shawn Crowley. Ms. Carroll sat half-turned in her seat, looking back at Ms. Crowley, past Mr. Trump, who was sitting only about 10 feet behind her.

Mr. Trump fumed when Ms. Crowley said that one way to respond legally to an allegation would be to say nothing. He shook his head vigorously.

Toward the end of Ms. Crowley’s argument, Mr. Trump started writing notes to his lawyer.

When Ms. Crowley made a comment about how Trump’s legal team wanted the jury to believe he was the victim at trial, Trump mouthed the word “true.”

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Who is Alina Habba, the lawyer for Donald Trump?

The lawsuit was dismissed, but Ms. Habba, 39, remained a fixture of Mr. Trump’s defense team. She is now representing him in two New York cases — a civil fraud trial brought by the state attorney general accusing Mr. Trump of inflating the value of his property, and the defamation trial brought by E. Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist whom a civil jury found he sexually abused in the mid-1990s.

The attention paid to Ms. Habba has not always been flattering. Lawyers have criticized her for making mistakes in court. She was mocked on Saturday Night Live.

Last Wednesday, during Ms. Carroll’s testimony, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan had to remind her about the rules of evidence when Ms. Habba tried to bring up a 2019 tweet.

“Guess what,” Judge Kaplan informed her. “You may not read from a document that’s not in evidence.”

If the criticism has bothered Ms. Habba, she has not shown it. But she did bristle last week when Judge Kaplan told her to “sit down” after she continued to protest his refusal to postpone court so Mr. Trump could attend the funeral of his mother-in-law.

“I don’t like to be spoken to in that way, your honor,” she said.

Ms. Habba, the daughter of Iraqi immigrants who fled the country in the 1980s to escape persecution for their Catholic beliefs, has been combative in and out of court, holding news conferences where she zealously defends and praises Mr. Trump.

Last November, during the fraud trial in Manhattan, Ms. Habba went after the judge, Arthur F. Engoron, who had chided Mr. Trump for giving meandering answers during his testimony.

“The judge doesn’t like when Trump explains what actually happened, because it’s not good for his narrative,” she said outside the courthouse during a lunch break.

Mr. Trump discovered Ms. Habba through his preferred method of finding lawyers: seeing them on television or meeting them through an existing business connection.

Last December, Mr. Trump praised her as a “beautiful woman” and “fierce” lawyer during a speech at the New York Republican Gala.

“Alina, she says ‘I’ll do it, sir, I’ll do it,’” he said. “And she goes and she makes the news. Every night she makes the news.”

Trump walked out of the courtroom during the closing argument by Carroll’s lawyer.

Soon after, Mr. Trump, in an unusual breach of courtroom decorum, stood up and walked out, though Ms. Kaplan continued as if nothing unusual had happened.

“The record will reflect that Mr. Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom,” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said.

When Mr. Trump got up to leave, it was sudden and came without a warning. He walked slowly out of the room, followed by one of his lawyers. He said nothing as he walked toward the door, and reporters and onlookers in the courtroom craned their necks to stare at him.

A sketch artist quickly began drawing him exiting the courtroom.

A number of reporters rushed to catch him outside. But he didn’t seem to emerge, and the reporters eventually returned to the building.

Later, Ms. Kaplan noted that Mr. Trump was using his attacks on Ms. Carroll as part of his presidential campaign. At one point, a juror leaned forward and looked expectantly at the door.

Before Mr. Trump walked out, before the closing arguments even began, he looked frustrated with the judge, shaking his head repeatedly. When Ms. Kaplan began describing last May’s verdict that found Mr. Trump had sexually abused Ms. Carroll, he grew more frustrated — scoffing, muttering and shaking his head.

Mr. Trump returned to the courtroom more than an hour after he left, around 11:15 a.m., just before his lawyer, Alina Habba, began her closing arguments.

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Who is Roberta A. Kaplan, the lawyer representing E. Jean Carroll?

She went on to co-found Time’s Up, an organization created to fight sexual abuse and promote gender equality after investigations into the actions of the movie producer Harvey Weinstein. But Ms. Kaplan resigned after a report found that she was involved in discrediting one of the women who had accused Andrew Cuomo, then New York’s governor, of sexual misconduct; Ms. Kaplan had close ties to him.

“Unfortunately, recent events have made it clear that even our apparent allies in the fight to advance women can turn out to be abusers,” Ms. Kaplan wrote in a letter submitting her resignation from the group. “We have felt the raw, personal and profound pain of that betrayal.”

Mr. Trump is a familiar legal foe for Ms. Kaplan. She represented Mary L. Trump, Mr. Trump’s niece, in a lawsuit, filed during his presidency, accusing him of fraud and civil conspiracy and saying that he and other relatives had cheated her out of tens of millions of dollars in inheritance. A judge dismissed the suit in 2022.

Ms. Kaplan also represented plaintiffs who accused Mr. Trump and three of his children of using the Trump name to lure vulnerable people into investing in bogus business opportunities. That case is still pending.

Ms. Kaplan is representing Ms. Carroll alongside other lawyers from Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, which she founded in 2017.

In Trump’s defamation trial, the nine most important people are enigmas.

The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, ordered that the jurors remain anonymous as they considered how much Mr. Trump should pay for saying Ms. Carroll lied when she accused him of sexual abuse, for which he has already been found liable. Judge Kaplan said jurors should be identified only by number and even suggested they not share their actual names with one other.

In a pretrial ruling, he explained his rationale, citing the potential for influence attempts, harassment or worse by Mr. Trump’s supporters — or the former president himself.

The jurors in the trial, which resumed Thursday after a pause following a juror’s illness, have revealed no real clues about how they view the case unfolding before them.

Ordinarily, before a trial, lawyers on both sides dig into the backgrounds of those summoned for jury duty, scanning their social media pages and, in a case like Carroll v. Trump, searching for indications of polarized political beliefs, said Rosanna Garcia, the chief executive of Vijilent Inc., a Massachusetts-based research firm that gathers public data about prospective jurors for attorneys.

“You can go through someone’s Facebook postings, and you can see a photo of them wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat,” she said. “In that case, you don’t even have to ask any questions. You know where they stand.”

Eighty prospective jurors were called in for Carroll v. Trump in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, according to a court spokesman; it took about half a day on Jan. 16 to conduct voir dire, the traditional examination used to screen out potential bias. The panel that was selected includes seven men and two women.

The trial comes less than a year after a different jury in the same courthouse awarded $5 million to Ms. Carroll, 80, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, after finding that Mr. Trump sexually abused her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s and defamed her in a post on his Truth Social website in 2022.

Judge Kaplan has ruled that those earlier findings apply in the current trial, which covers separate remarks, and that Mr. Trump, 77, may not contest in court — as he frequently does elsewhere — Ms. Carroll’s version of events or argue that she fabricated her account.

The narrow damages issue before the jury stems from comments Mr. Trump made in June 2019, after Ms. Carroll first accused him of the assault in a New York magazine article. Mr. Trump, who was then still in office, responded that her claim was “totally false,” that he had never met her and that she was trying to sell a book.

Ms. Carroll testified last week that her reputation has been “shattered” by Mr. Trump’s comments and his continued lashing out in social media posts, on CNN, in news conferences and on the campaign trial, as recently as last week.

When jury selection was held last week, Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump’s lawyers jockeyed to identify those who they felt would be sympathetic to their client’s cause. But they were able to assess potential jurors only by their limited answers to questions Judge Kaplan posed concerning their backgrounds, occupations and politics.

Many of the prospective jurors indicated that they were registered with a political party, though they were not asked which one. Many said they had voted in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, but they were not asked to reveal for whom they had cast their ballots.

Those whose responses suggested they were more politically engaged did not make it onto the panel — like one retired English teacher who got her news from “Pod Save America,” a podcast hosted by former aides to former President Barack Obama, and a workplace investigator from Westchester who had attended a Trump rally.

Nor did a 60-year-old corporate lawyer from Manhattan who answered affirmatively when Judge Kaplan asked whether anyone felt that Mr. Trump was being treated unfairly by the courts.

“I don’t think a lot of these matters have been brought with any sense of fairness,” the lawyer said, referring to the myriad civil and criminal cases Mr. Trump is facing. “The motives, in my view, are suspect.”

Some of the questions were more mundane. People were asked whether they had ever contributed money or supported a political campaign for Mr. Trump, Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.

“Have any of you ever read any books by Mr. Trump?” the judge asked. “No affirmative response,” he noted.

How about books or columns by Ms. Carroll? he continued.

“I’ve read her column a few times,” one woman responded.

“Would that affect your ability to be fair to both sides in this case?” Judge Kaplan asked.

“No,” the woman said.

“Has anybody ever watched ‘The Apprentice?’” the judge asked. A handful indicated they had.

In the end, those selected for the jury included a retired track supervisor for the New York City Transit Authority, a property manager, an emergency medicine doctor, a publicist and five other New Yorkers.

A majority said they were from Manhattan, the Bronx and Westchester County. Not everyone offered their age, but among those who did, the ages ranged from 26 years old to 60 years old.

In court, the jury has been hard to read. Jurors have largely kept their expressions blank, focusing on testimony and taking notes.

One male juror cracked a smile when the title of one of Ms. Carroll’s books, “What Do We Need Men For?” was said aloud in court.

The same juror chuckled after Ms. Carroll’s lawyers displayed a post on X that showed a photo of her smiling next to an image of the Crypt-Keeper, a decaying comic-book and television character. “I want to stipulate that I am on the left,” Ms. Carroll remarked drolly.

It was a light moment amid difficult testimony by Ms. Carroll about the deluge of often cruel posts on social media and emails to her inbox, some containing threats to kill or rape her.

As Ms. Carroll described the fear she felt as she read the messages, jurors looked solemn and attentive; Mr. Trump shook his head and sometimes scoffed.

Kate Christobek contributed reporting.