Donald Trump has secured a nearly $92m bond to support the New York writer E Jean Carroll’s defamation verdict against him while he appeals the civil case, his lawyers said in court papers on Friday.
The court filing came one day after the Manhattan federal court judge Lewis Kaplan denied the former US president’s request to delay enforcement of the $83.3m verdict jurors awarded to Carroll on 26 January. Trump’s deadline for paying cash or posting a bond while he appeals is 11 March.
Trump’s attorney Alina Habba is asking Kaplan to approve the bond, which is more than the verdict demanded, to cover interest. If Kaplan does so, Trump will not have to pay the money to Carroll yet, pending appeal.
The securing of this bond, however, does little to alleviate Trump’s significant financial woes, as the Manhattan supreme court justice Arthur Engoron on 16 February ordered Trump to pay $355m in New York attorney general Letitia James’s separate civil fraud suit against him. James’s office has said that, with interest, Trump owes some $453m.
Friday’s development came several weeks before Trump will face his first criminal trial in the litany of indictments against him. On 25 March, jury selection is expected to begin in Manhattan state prosecutors’ hush-money criminal case involving the adult film star Stormy Daniels and the Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Meanwhile, Carroll won $18.3m in compensatory damages and $65m in punitive retribution in her second defamation trial against Trump. The jury’s decision came less than one year after a Manhattan federal court jury awarded $5m to Carroll in her sexual abuse and defamation case against him.
In a June 2019 New York magazine article, which excerpted Carroll’s then forthcoming book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, she wrote that Trump had raped her in the changing room of a luxury Manhattan department store.
Carroll said that the way Trump denied her claim – for example, claiming that she was a lying political operative – ruined her reputation and career. She filed suit over these denials in 2019, as the state’s civil statute of limitations at the time barred her from suing Trump over the sexual assault.
A new law in 2022, the Adult Survivors Act, granted adult accusers a one-year window to file suit over incidents outside the civil statute of limitations. Carroll sued Trump again, this time over the incident and defamatory comments Trump made after he was no longer president.
Asked for comment on the securing of this bond, Steven Cheung, Trump campaign communications director, said in a statement: “A bond has been filed in the full amount of the baseless judgment in the Democrat-funded Carroll witch-hunt, which is being appealed and litigated. All of the Crooked Joe Biden-directed hoaxes will be crushed and President Trump will Make America great again.”
