Who would have thought it? Having a classless, obnoxious lawyer, ranting on social media, and stomping out of the courtroom during closing arguments is not a winning strategy. Donald Trump lost again and has been ordered to pay $83.3 million in damages to E. Jean Carroll.
The saddest thing about it is that will not derail the asshole’s presidential campaign in the slightest.
I just hope the Democrats hammer on his unsuitability for any office at all in the looming campaign.
Shoot I was hoping it would be more!
#1 brightmoon:
Yes, me too, like in the 300 million range.
With drawn-out appeals and hiding of assets, etc., I wonder if Ms. Carroll will ever see any of that money.
E. Jean Carroll still has that blue dress with Trumps dried semen on it. I am still mad Trump was never forced to give a DNA sample to compare the two.
numba 3 – is that a tired ass bill clinton joke or did that really happen twice … too tired to care i guess, just hemisemidemi-curious
@1
I suppose if he keeps mouthing off, there is always a chance of a round 3
@4 Great American Satan:
Not a blue dress but yes, E. Jean Carroll has the dress she was assaulted in. As a civil case the court didn’t force Trump to provide DNA.
I don’t know if that was held against him or not when the judge held him liable.
Does anyone really believe that Carroll will see one f.ing dime of that $83 million? Trump will eventually take it to the Trump-appointed US Supreme Court, which will not only rule in Trump’s favor but will get him reelected in November.
President Biden, grow a f.ing spine and use an Executive Order to exile the traitorous Trump to Russia or, better, yet, to the dark side of the moon.
The fine for damage to Carroll’s reputation is only about $7M, the rest is all punitive damages. The punitive part is more solid than usual because this is the second Trump loss because Trump continued to defame Carroll after losing the first case. One thing that helps in the seizing of Trump’s assets is all the disclosure already coming from the suit over his business misconduct.
Not enough, not nearly enough…
Not enough, not nearly enough…
During the first trial, the judge essentially asked “can you feel that $5 million disappearing”?
Today it was “how do you like losing another $83.3 million”?
Between the repeated public defamation, Trump’s frequent public bragging of being a billionaire, the ugly details of his New York tax fraud, and Alina Habba possibly handling the appeal, I imagine Trump will see both the money disappear and an order for that additional $300 million before he eats his last burnt steak with ketchup.
Several legal pundits seem to think it’s a good number. If it was much higher, an appeals court would likely reduce the punitive damages significantly, but in light of Trump’s continuing behavior they seem to think that this amount of money has a good chance of withstanding the appeals process.
Almost certainly, though she’ll have to wait for the appeals process to be completed. It seems unlikely any of the appeals will succeed in getting the verdicts overturned (though perhaps the damages could be lowered), and the SCOTUS is much less likely to intervene in these civil cases than they are with Trump’s criminal cases.
The lower appeals court isn’t going to leave them with much wriggle room to find good cause for upholding the appeals, and they’re not going to “go there” with the election interference line Trump has been pushing. Too obvious.
Seize all his property as collateral until he pays the fines.
Extracting that money is the next challenge.
Will this stop Trump lying about his sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll and continuing to defame her -as wellas the Justice in this case?
Is there going to be any real penalty if he does? Can he now go to jail for Contempt of Court if he continues his lies and libels about this? I wonder..
Looking forward to Legal Eagles’ expert take on this too.
Heh. No.
Define ‘real’. This is just par for the course. Like his golf.
About the much as he could have for years now. aLSO, youR capitAlisation does Amuse.
Heh. Legal Eagle’s — it’s not a plural. One person.
Here has two federal cases starting this Spring. He’s about to be in for a lot more pain.
@16. John Morales :
Possessive apostrophe – the expert take provided by / “belonging to” Legal Eagle.
His golf where Trump also cheats and lies and (usually?) gets away with that. Which doesn’t matter that much becoz its golf – but when it comes to things that have more serious impacts like law cases and national politics and international politics and things that do real harm to peoples lives then it does matter to many that he faces real consequences. Defined as “real” one’s that actually deter and impede and stop him from doing those harms, telling those lies and from getting away with it. Consquences like causing him serious financial & political and social pain that takes away his ability to hurt others and ideally sees him imprisoned and out of politics and unable to again take over the USA and thus ever be in a position to damage the world as we know it. Trump is actively making the world a worse place. I want the world to be a better place so, yeah, he needs to stopped and rejected and, if not suffer necessarily, then at least NOT make others suffer.
Thanks I guess? I’m really tired. Have been ever since I got up this morning. I don’t get enough sleep. My fingers are really clumsy & I swear my computer switches letters on me constantly. Yeah, its really long, long, long overdue that Trump found that no, fame does NOT mean you can get away with anything and no, being POTUS isn’t the same as being God-Emperor however much your kult members & you may wish it were so.
He can’t appeal unless he drops 83.3 million into escrow. Does he have that kind of liquid cash on hand? He’d be better off not appealing and just twiddling his thumbs like Alex Jones.
He does seem to be a little scared now, as evidenced by his refraining from even saying her name in his rants since the judgement. I expect that to last for…3…2…1…..
I don’t know who does Trump’s hair, but this person could be a superhero if only they would cut off his comb-over.
I’m saying to you directly, your go fund me would be fully supported by millions of people. Don’t miss this opportunity to save a nation…hell. a world.
I wonder if he’s tired of winning yet?
It completely boggles my mind that he keeps making ridiculous claims like that they didn’t let him enter DNA evidence, when he had avoided providing it for years.
… shoulda asked Stormy Daniels for a sample.
For some hypertechnical reasons, the punitive portion of the damages will probably be partially remitted (= reduced). There are two reasons for this… both of them bad, but let’s be realistic here.
(1) There’s a set of opinions from the US Supreme Court, and a large body of lower-appellate-court Federal opinions and parallel state opinions, that treats any punitive damages award greater than the compensatory damages found (not necessarily awarded — further hypertechnical stuff about “contributory acts/negligence” buried in law-journal articles that don’t agree with each other) as inherently suspect. That’s not to say “never justified,” but that too much “punishment” in a civil case under the more-probable-than-not standard of proof implicates “criminal penalties” that would ordinarily be under the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard of proof and also subject to stiffer rules about how that evidence can be gathered… and not left to the plaintiff’s lawyers to prosecute, but committed to solemn prosecutorial discretion. (Which is all too often an elected official and/or moralistic sleazebucket who couldn’t recognize hypocrisy if it wasn’t called out on Faux News.)
In this case, the punitive damages ($65M) are 3.55 times the compensatory damages ($18.3M). Under the 1-to-1 guideline, that will strongly encourage the trial judge, and/or an appellate court, to remit (reduce) the punitive damages. Besides:
(2) Reducing the punitive damages award makes the reviewing judge(s) look entirely reasonable, like they’ve carefully considered the evidence and the worst aspects of the jury system — the median juror’s complete lack of context. Further it will be giving something to both sides, which with relatively normal litigants at least allows both sides’ lawyers to point to something on which they were victorious.
Of course, “relatively normal litigants” doesn’t apply here — especially when Ms Carroll’s lawyers opted not to ask the judge to issue a punitive-damages instruction, and the jury awarded punitive damages anyway. This is also complicated by the IMNSHO misconduct, both inside and outside the courtroom, by the defendant’s counsel; courts are often reluctant to affirm punishment imposed on a defendant that “looks like” it might have been increased by the lawyers’ conduct. They’ll happily penalize plaintiffs/prosecutors that way — which hardly seems fair, but then that’s the problem when “general legal principles” meet up with “egregious, unanticipated-in-complete-context conduct.”
Side issue: Whether, on or about 18 January 2025 if that guy from Queens ends up winning the Presidency, he follows in Alex Jones’s footsteps and files for a personal bankruptcy proceeding, followed by at least three years of further litigation over the scope of the automatic stay and its application when the Debtor is the President. During which time it’s certainly possible that Ms Carroll might become incapacitated or suffer an untimely death, resulting in the substitution of her estate in attempting to collect on the judgment for a reputational injury… alongside all other creditors trying to collect from the Debtor’s personal affairs without improperly reaching things to which anyone else (his wife, his kids, his corporation(s)) that is not a co-Debtor has a claim… just like Alex Jones did…
Sometimes the real world just can’t help throwing up circumstances that are even less credible than law-school hypotheticals that are trying to find the extreme limits of a rule’s application. This is one of those times.
I wonder how much Carroll actually cares about the money versus having beat Blobbo…twice. As an 80-year-old millionaire, she’s probably set financially. But she has gotten some vindication for the fact that he assaulted her and went out of his way to insult her. If he continues to be a jerk…and difficult to imagine that he wouldn’t…she might have another go at him.
Given that he can’t shut up, even in front of a judge, and he’s costing the family estate significantly, I wonder if his children have considered having him declared mentally incompetent. That would be rich.
re: ”cares about the money” – 100% money.
Every time she gets media coverage, she just reminds people she’s an unstable sexual assault hoaxer and loses whatever public respect she might otherwise have. If it weren’t greed motivating her she’d be concerned about the loss of dignity, but I guess everything has a price.
Boring procedural stuff: If Trump does nothing, then Carroll can start collecting once 30 days pass from the entry of the judgment on the verdict, which will probably be entered this coming week. (Then we might eventually see the E. Jean Carroll Tower on Fifth Avenue..) That won’t happen, though, because the 30-day wait is designed to allow filing of a notice of appeal (which does not stay collection efforts) and the filing of an appeal bond, often known by the older, pretentious law-Latin name of a supersedeas bond. The bond (which under the applicable local rules, must be in the amount of !!!% of the judgment to cover anticipated interest) provides security for the eventual payment of the judgment plus interest if the appeal is unsuccessful and stays collection efforts until then. Exactly what Trump would have to put up to get the bond is a matter of negotiation between him and the bonding company, but usually the person seeking the bond has to put up close to the full amount in cash, securities,real property, or letters of credit. Trump has already bonded the judgment in the first Carroll trial, so no one is out trying to collect the $5-odd million from that case..
When I first read about the verdict, my eye unconsciously moved the decimal point to the left and I though $8.3 million was stiff but easily supportable. The real amount strikes me as excessive. Don’t look for a rigorous argument, though. Courts have standard verbiage but it’s really an “I know it when I see it” standard. Still, even a big reduction will leave Trump owing big money.
Even the MAGA crowd is unlikely to be able to raise $83.3 million in less than 30 days, so Donny T probably won’t be able to appeal with a bond of entirely op money. He will have to put up at least some of his own. I wonder if he remembers how to do that?
@26. cjcolucci : “The real amount strikes me as excessive.”
Excessive? Why? Especially considering that Trump continues to lie about what he did to her and abuse her and sic his kultists on her.
Is she getting the money? Who knows? But he’ll still be out it if he appeals. And she will have achieved her secondary goal. And her money isn’t the real problem anyway.
@26, @28:
Measuring “excessive” is best left to those who actually heard the evidence. That’s the jury.
Reactions to large verdicts remind me all too much of how insurance-company adjusters think of the “windfalls” that the insured are getting. It’s actually quite a serious problem, and many of my colleagues in the oft-derided personal-injury bar will use peremptory strikes against anyone who works for the insurance industry or a broker, or is married to or the child of someone who is — because there’s actually pretty solid psychological evidence regarding inability to break out of the “windfall” mindset for those ordinarily tasked with evaluating claims from a distance without actually seeing the source of the claim. On the evidence of the post-trial comments, even the threat of this specific number is insufficient to keep this… individual… from continuing to make virtually the same statements, so perhaps that award isn’t high enough to deter.
Oh, wait: Deter a sociopathic narcissist with a big warchest (at least compared to me) from anything? Never mind.
The point here is that the “one number” of the jury verdict is actually a composite of several different things presented as a single out-of-context number. Which is precisely what appellate lawyers will argue over later anyway.
As SSAT Donald Trump is the embodiment of ‘excessive’, I see no problem with the amount.
Trump went after his lawyer in his tweets today, blaming her for giving the in-your-face defense that he demanded.
The joke from Lawtwitter (and legal onlookers adjacent) was that MAGA stands for “Making Attorneys Get Attorneys”.
“Excessive? Why?” – I don’t have a fee schedule, but I can assure you that the going rate for slandering political opponents is much less.