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President Donald Trump’s legal team announced plans to appeal after a federal judge ruled on Wednesday that writer E. Jean Carroll can collect $5.8 million awarded by a jury.
The president has already deposited the funds into a court-secured account. The U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to disturb the 2023 civil verdict, clearing the way for U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to authorize the release of the money. The initial $5 million judgment has since grown to $5.8 million with accrued interest.
The civil jury determined that President Trump attacked Carroll in 1996 inside a luxury department store dressing room and later defamed her when she publicly detailed the assault in a 2019 memoir published during Trump’s first term.
The president’s lawyers are asking the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to put the distribution order on hold.
The Manhattan jury reached its verdict following a trial that Trump did not attend after Carroll testified that a flirtatious and friendly chance encounter at Bergdorf Goodman turned violent when Trump sexually abused her.
President Trump has repeatedly insisted that he never knew Carroll, now 82. He has also accused her of fabricating the allegations to boost book sales and acting on partisan motives.
Separately, the president is appealing a massive $83 million defamation judgment awarded to Carroll by a different Manhattan jury following a January 2024 trial at which he briefly took the witness stand.
During that second trial, Kaplan instructed the jury that they were legally bound to accept the prior jury’s findings of abuse and were tasked only with determining what financial damages, if any, President Trump owed Carroll for derogatory comments he made about her while serving as president.
His defense attorneys complained that the judge’s strict evidentiary rules for the damages trial unfairly barred Trump and his legal team from telling the jury that the encounter with Carroll never took place.
