July 19 (UPI) — A federal judge Wednesday denied a request from former president Donald Trump for a new trial in a civil lawsuit lodged against him for sexual abuse and defamation.
Wednesday’s motion upholds a judgment against Trump requiring him to pay author and former Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll, $5 million in damages.
A New York jury in May initially found Trump liable in the case, after Carroll said the former president sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s.
Trump has denied the allegations, calling them a hoax.
The hoax claim is tied to the defamation aspect of the case.
Carrol was awarded $2 million in compensation and $20,000 in punitive damages for battery. The jury then awarded her $1.7 million in the defamation portion for reputational repair, $1 million in compensatory damages and an additional $280,000 in punitive damages.
His lawyers argued that because a jury found him guilty of sexual assault and not rape, the ruling should be thrown out.
Trump “therefore ignores the bulk of the evidence at trial, misinterprets the jury’s verdict, and mistakenly focuses on the New York Penal Law definition of ‘rape’ to the exclusion of the meaning of that word as it often is used in everyday life and of the evidence of what actually occurred between Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump,” District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York Lewis Kaplan wrote in his ruling.
“Now that the court has denied Trump’s motion for a new trial or to decrease the amount of the verdict, E. Jean Carroll looks forward to receiving the $5 million in damages that the jury awarded her,” Carroll’s lawyer Robbie Kaplan said Wednesday, following the judgment.
Trump also was seeking to reduce the financial amount, calling the $5 million total excessive, however Kaplan said the amount “did not deviate materially from reasonable compensation so as to make it excessive.”
Carroll has a separate defamation trial against Trump scheduled for January next year.
