Judge approves Trump’s $92 million bond to cover jury award in E. Jean Carroll defamation case

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday approved the $92 million bond put up by former President Donald Trump to ensure that writer E. Jean Carroll will receive a jury award for his verbal attacks against her if it survives appeals.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan formally approved the bond on Tuesday, a day after lawyers agreed there was no argument over it.

The bond offered by the Republican 2024 presidential front-runner comes after Trump’s lawyers announced they were appealing the verdict to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan.

Over the weekend at a campaign rally, Trump resumed his attacks on the credibility of the longtime advice columnist, saying she had falsely accused him of raping her in spring 1996 in the dressing room of a luxury department store across the street from Trump Tower.

Her lawyer responded to his remarks at the Georgia rally and a Monday television appearance by suggesting that a third defamation lawsuit was possible if Trump’s verbal attacks continued.

Trump had all but stopped his public attacks on Carroll in the weeks after the $83.3 million January defamation award by a jury that had been instructed only to assess damages from Trump’s 2019 statements while he was president and accept the findings of another Manhattan jury that last May awarded Carroll $5 million.

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That jury had concluded that Trump defamed Carroll in 2022 and sexually abused her in 1996, though it also found that he had not raped her according to how rape was defined in New York state. The judge, though, said afterward that the jury’s findings were consistent with how rape is defined in some jurisdictions.

Trump did not show up for the May trial, but he attended nearly every day in January, grumbling about the case aloud even when jurors were seated in the courtroom. His testimony, though, was limited to just a few minutes because he was not permitted to refute conclusions that had been resolved by the jury last year.

Carroll first made her claims public against Trump in a 2019 memoir.

Trump, 77, also faces a $454 million civil fraud penalty after a New York state judge ruled against him recently. He also faces four criminal cases.