The Manhattan judge who oversaw the defamation lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump on February 25 rejected Trump’s request for an administrative stay to delay paying the $83.3 million jury award, Forbes reported.
In a motion filed on February 23, Trump’s attorney in the case, Alina Habba, requested a pause on the judgment for 30 days from when his post-trial motions were filed in early March, or to allow Trump to post “an appropriate fraction” of the damages as a bond.
Habba argued that the post-trial motions were likely to “substantially reduce, if not eliminate” the total amount of the jury award. She claimed that E. Jean Carroll failed to provide evidence at trial that her distress was significant enough to result in “medical, physical, or clinical consequences.”
In his ruling, Judge Lewis Kaplan said he would not grant a stay before first allowing the plaintiff’s attorneys to respond to the defense’s request. He gave Carroll and her attorneys until Friday, March 1 to respond to Habba’s motion.
The jury in January ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million in punitive and compensatory damages for defaming her in 2019 when she first went public with her accusation that Donald Trump raped her in the 1990s.
The jury award in the case is just a fraction of what the former president has been ordered to cough up in recent civil trials.
In early February, the judge overseeing the civil fraud trial in New York ordered Trump and his co-defendants to pay the state $354.9 million plus interest for fraudulently inflating the value of Trump’s and his company’s assets. With interest accrued on fines imposed in 2019, 2022, and 2023, the total judgment in the case exceeded $454 million.
According to Forbes, to cover the costs of the judgments against him, Trump could tap into the approximately $400 million in liquid assets at his disposal or borrow against one of his more than two dozen mortgage-free properties.
