Donald Trump has been sentenced to more than $83 million in compensation in a defamation trial. That is much more than plaintiff E. Jean Carroll asked for.
Former US President Donald Trump has been sentenced to a further compensation payment of $83.3 million (around €77 million) in a second defamation trial in New York. This was decided by a jury on Friday, as US media unanimously reported.
It was the second civil lawsuit brought by 80-year-old US author E. Jean Carroll against Trump. The sum is many times higher than the more than ten million dollars demanded by Carroll.
Jury finds ex-president guilty
At the end of the first trial in May, a New York jury found it proven that Trump had attacked Carroll in a luxury New York department store in 1996, sexually abused him and later slandered him. The jury then awarded the writer compensation of five million dollars (around 4.65 million euros).
Before the start of the second trial, Judge Lewis Kaplan had ruled that Trump’s later comments were defamatory. The jury now only had to decide on the amount of compensation that Trump had to pay.
Donald Trump disrupts court
Trump appeared in person several times in the second trial – unlike in the first – and was disturbingly noticed by numerous commenting opinions, which is why the judge had threatened to exclude him in the meantime.
The 77-year-old is considered the Republicans’ most promising candidate in the presidential elections scheduled for November. However, he currently has to deal with the courts in numerous different cases. Trump often uses the court dates as a kind of campaign event.