NEW YORK (Reuters) — A federal judge on Wednesday rejected Donald Trump’s request for a new trial on damages after a jury found the former U.S. president liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million.
In a 59-page decision, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan dismissed Trump’s arguments for reducing damages to less than $1 million, saying the May 9 verdict was neither a “seriously erroneous result” nor a “miscarriage of justice.”
Carroll, 79, accused Trump, 77, of raping her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s, and then branding the incident a hoax in an October 2022 post on his Truth Social platform.
Trump is appealing the verdict. His lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Carroll’s lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests.
In seeking a reduction in damages, Trump called the $2 million award for sexual abuse “grossly excessive” because such abuse could have included groping Carroll’s breasts through clothing, “which is a far cry from rape.”
But the judge said New York’s penal law defines rape much more narrowly than ordinary people think of the term, and Trump was wrong to insist it excused him.
“The proof convincingly established, and the jury implicitly found, that Mr. Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” the judge wrote.
“Mr. Trump’s argument therefore ignores the bulk of the evidence at trial, misinterprets the jury’s verdict, and (ignored) evidence of what actually occurred between Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump,” he added.
Kaplan also said the evidence justified awarding Carroll $3 million for defamation, rejecting Trump’s claim that the award was based on “pure speculation” about how Carroll’s reputation was harmed.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)
