Judge reject’s Trump’s bid for a new trial in $83.3 million E. Jean Carroll defamation case

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge in New York rejected Donald Trump’s request for a new trial on Thursday after a jury awarded $83.3 million in damages to a longtime magazine columnist who sued the former president for defamation for calling her claim that he had sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store a lie.

The judge rejected the former president’s claims that the compensatory and punitive damages awarded to writer E. Jean Carroll in January were excessive.

The January verdict came after Carroll, 80, an author and former advice columnist for Elle magazine, testified that Trump’s public statements about her had led to death threats.

Judge Lewis Kaplan said in his ruling Thursday that the jury was entitled to find that “the degree of reprehensibility” of Trump’s attacks against Carroll on social media was high.

“Far from being purely ‘defensive,’ there was evidence that Mr. Trump used the office of the presidency — the loudest ‘bully pulpit’ in America and possibly the world — to issue multiple statements castigating Ms. Carroll as a politically and financially motivated liar, insinuating that she was too unattractive for him to have sexually assaulted, and threatening that she would ‘pay dearly’ for speaking out,” Kaplan said.

The decision was the second time that a civil jury returned a verdict related to Carroll’s claim that an encounter with Trump in 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman’s dressing room ended violently. She said Trump slammed her against a wall, pulled down her tights and forced himself on her.

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