How much money could Donald Trump end up paying out in damages?

Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, has enjoyed a dominant start to the year in the GOP primaries, picking up comfortable wins in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada as all but one of his challengers has fallen away, leaving his victory little more than a formality unless Nikki Haley can conjure a dramatic upset against the odds.

It has been a rather different story in the courts, however.

Mr Trump has four criminal indictments and 91 felony charges hanging over his head and remains caught up in a complex web of legal entanglements, any one of which poses a potential threat to his candidacy and one of which has already delivered a financial bombshell that left the candidate reeling.

On Friday 26 January, a New York jury ordered Mr Trump to pay out an astonishing $83.3m to retired Elle magazine columnist E Jean Carroll in compensation for having defamed her, the amount intended to deter him from using his public platform to lash out at those he believes have wronged him, as he currently does on a near-daily basis.

Mr Trump was last year found liable for sexually assaulting Ms Carroll in the dressing room of Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, an accusation she first levelled against him in her memoir What Do We Need Men For?, which was published during his presidency in 2019.

The Republican’s subsequent denials, claiming never to have even met his accuser and insisting she was not his “type”, ultimately led to a second civil trial that ended last month with the jury deciding Mr Trump should pay Ms Carroll a sum far in advance of the $10m she and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan had asked for as compensation for the reputational damage she had sustained, Mr