By Jonathan Stempel and Jack Queen
NEW YORK, July 8 (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Wednesday authorized the payment of a multimillion-dollar verdict to magazine writer E. Jean Carroll to satisfy a 2023 civil verdict in which a jury found President Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan ordered the disbursement of nearly $5.8 million to the former Elle magazine advice columnist, representing the original $5 million verdict plus interest.
The funds had been held in escrow while Trump appealed the verdict, but the U.S. Supreme Court on June 29 declined to take up the Republican president’s case. None of the nine justices, including three appointed by Trump, noted dissents.
Trump appealed Kaplan’s order to the federal appeals court in Manhattan, less than an hour after the judge issued it.
“The American People stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes,” a spokesperson for Trump’s lawyers said in a statement.
Lawyers for Carroll had no immediate comment.
TRUMP’S LAWYERS WARN OF ‘WEAPONIZATION’ OF LEGAL SYSTEM
In a Tuesday night court filing, Trump’s lawyers said Carroll should wait to collect damages until after the Supreme Court reviewed Trump’s renewed bid to overturn the verdict.
The lawyers said Trump would be irreparably harmed and face “unrecoverable loss” if Carroll fulfills her stated intention to give away the money, because once she does the money likely could not be recovered.
They also said letting Carroll recover, only to have the Supreme Court grant a rehearing, would “undermine public confidence in an orderly judicial process” at a time when Trump’s supporters and some critics, according to his lawyers, voice “concerns about politically motivated weaponization of the legal system.”
Trump submitted a petition to the Supreme Court on Wednesday to rehear his appeal. The Supreme Court rarely takes up appeals after initially turning them down.
TRUMP PLANS SECOND APPEAL
Carroll, 82, and Trump, 80, have battled in court for nearly seven years, after Carroll first publicly accused the president of raping her around 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.
Trump has rejected Carroll’s claims as a hoax and “con job,” denying he knew her and saying she made up the alleged rape to help sell her memoir.
Jurors awarded Carroll $5 million based on a Trump denial in 2022, though they did not find that Trump raped her.
A different jury in January 2024 ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million in damages based on his original denial in 2019, which occurred during his first White House term.
Trump has said he deserves presidential immunity for that denial.
Last September, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan declined to throw out the $83.3 million verdict.
Trump plans to appeal that decision to the Supreme Court, and his lawyers said a successful appeal could undermine the basis for the $5 million verdict.
Carroll has accused Trump of stalling both lawsuits to avoid accountability.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Will Dunham and David Gregorio)
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