[UPDATE: SSAT has posted a $91.6 million bond in the E. Jean Carroll case.
Federal Insurance Co. is a division of the large insurer Chubb. It was not immediately clear what property or other investments Trump pledged as collateral in order to get the bond.
The bond is dated Tuesday and signed by Trump and a representative of the insurance company. That means it was available several days before Kaplan declined Trump’s request to postpone the deadline.]
Late last evening, judge Lewis Kaplan denied the appeal by s serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to either delay the payment of the bond in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case or to reduce the amount.
Kaplan made the verdict official on 8 February and gave Trump 30 days to post a bond or come up with cash during his appeal, which is expected to challenge the jury’s finding of liability and the amount of damages.
Trump had sought to delay enforcement of the verdict until the judge ruled on his motions to throw it out, which he filed on Tuesday.
But the judge said Trump should not have waited 25 days after the verdict before seeking a delay.
He also said Trump failed to show how he might suffer “irreparable injury” if required to post a bond.
…“Mr Trump’s current situation is a result of his own dilatory actions,” the judge wrote.
In seeking to avoid posting a big bond, or any bond at all, lawyers for Trump rejected Carroll’s claim that his finances were strained.
They assured that Carroll was “fully protected” and said a $24.5m bond would be more than enough to “secure any minimal risk” to her.
Carroll disagreed. She said Trump’s finances were opaque, called Trump the “least trustworthy of borrowers” and said his request “boils down to nothing more than, ‘Trust me.’”
Trump’s financial flexibility deteriorated last month, when the judge who found him liable in New York attorney general Letitia James’s civil fraud case ordered him to pay $454.2m.
He offered to post a $100m bond in that case, but James said any bond should cover the entire judgment.
An appeals court judge on 28 February denied Trump’s request to delay enforcement during the appeal.
So let’s see if and how SSAT comes up with the money.
It is a measure of the number of legal tangles that SSAT is embroiled in that I did not even know about a case in the UK where he has just suffered another legal defeat.
This one seems to be a purely self-inflicted wound. Unlike the cases in the US where SSAT was being targeted and was the defendant, in this case he had sued in UK courts a company called Orbis associated with the so-called Steele dossier prepared by a former MI6 Christopher Steele that had alleged that he had some nefarious connections with Russia. This dossier was leaked to the press during the 2016 presidential campaign.
A London judge, who threw out the case against Orbis Business Intelligence last month saying it was “bound to fail”, ordered Trump to pay legal fees of £300,000 ($382,000), according to court documents released on Thursday.
Orbis was founded by Christopher Steele, who once ran the Russia desk for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6.
…In England, [Trump] had gone on the offensive and sued Orbis.
Steele was paid by Democrats for research that included salacious allegations Russians could potentially use to blackmail Trump. The so-called Steele dossier assembled in 2016 created a political storm just before Trump’s inauguration with rumors and uncorroborated allegations that have since been largely discredited.
I do not know what the rules are in the UK about paying fines when you lose a case. Given the multimillion dollar verdicts that SSAT has suffered in the US, $382,000 may not seem like much but it is not peanuts either.
Retired lawyer here -- in general, the American rule on fees is that each party pays their own, unless there is a statute or contract provision that gives the prevailing party the right to get fees from the losing party. The general European rule is that the loser pays the winner’s fees, period.
Clearly, SSAT did not do his due dilligence before filing a lawsuit in Britain. But in 2016, he must have felt invincible.
Rebecca Wiess @ 1
Welcome to the commentariat. If you belong to the generation that won major victories for equality in the seventies*, it must be incredibly frustrating to behold the current US supreme court/ US politics.
*I remember that period well. We thought progress was a one-way street.
PS In case the unthinkable happens in November, Scandinavia and Canada are nice places to live.
birgerjohansson @3: yeah, I’ve long thougt that Scandinavia would be a good place to move to; but considering where I come from, they might not want me around. 😎
birgerjohansson,
Canada may end up being less nice if the unthinkable does happen because we’re likely to suffer quite a bit of collateral damage. There’s the issue that our economy is very tied up with the US but also the idiots in Canada will feel empowered to be even more stupid and active.
I hope he didn’t get a little help from Elon. That ain’t legal, is it?
Matt G.,
I think it would be legal.
In regards to Trump’s bond, Trump got an insurance company named Chubb to act as bondsman. They put up the money and Trump pays them something. Initial guesswork is that Trump called in some favors, Chubb’s CEO was appointed to a White House advisory committee when Trump was in office. If Trump put some of his property to back this it won’t cost Chubb much, in theory. If Chubb ends up having to go to court to get Trump to pay up they will lose millions out of their payment.
Trump has the bigger NY Civil Tax Fraud case payment in March also, owes on various smaller cases and still has ongoing cases that he needs to pay his lawyers for. So his financial troubles are just beginning if he was really having trouble paying on this. He may have just wanted to hold onto his cash or is trying to setup better terms.
I wonder if he will stall on all of these and then try to declare bankruptcy. If he doesn’t win he could see that as a way of keeping hold of some part of his empire and/or delaying cases further.
Never had to help a client with bonding over such a large judgment. For a few hundred thousand, as opposed to a few hundred million, bonding company typically looked for 1) bond fee of 10% of the amount bonded, and 2) at least twice that amount in assets to secure the bond. The tricky negotiation part was whether an asset had existing secured interests, and whether bonding company was comfortable being subordinate to those interests.
In terms of Orbis getting their money if there are problems, which there likely will be based on his history, Trump does “own” two golf courses in the UK. He is not locally popular having built one of them on sensitive and important dunes, and then in both cases tried to build more than originally proposed, eg houses supposedly for staff. The latter in particular didn’t go down well with the Planning Authority or courts because the original application had included new housing and was rejected because of that new housing, being seen as an underhand way of trying to build housing in a situation it would not otherwise have been permitted. Anyway point is theoretically he has UK assets that could be sold to enforce payment, but that would require further court action.
birgerjohanson @#3
Oldest part of the boomer curve -- did a lot of first for a female in my early adulthood. But never had any illusions that the forces of oppression were gone, and would break out at every opportunity.
Sorry for the double post, the first didn’t show up in Recent Comments for me.
[I deleted the first one. -- Mano]
@ REBECCA WIESS; thank you sincerely for your hard work! When I was a child, women couldn’t have their own bank accounts, credit cards, or mortgages in their own name. Forget birth control--even after the pill was in production, it wasn’t easy to get. “Good” women stayed home to be mommies (and based on the ones I knew growing up, were miserable when their most impactful decision of the day was whether to have strawberry or peach Jello for dessert), or if they were “unfortunate” spinsters, they could be teachers or secretaries or--if they were REALLY uppity eggheads--nurses. When their husbands divorced them in favor of the trophy wife, they were up a creek with no way to support themselves. I grew up alongside Free to Be--You and Me and Our Bodies, Ourselves. I was one of two women in my class of 300 Computer Science majors in college and had to fight the “girls can’t program computers!” mindset.
It used to drive me crazy when Millennial women would fatuously declare, “I’m not a feminist!” When I pointed out that feminism’s goal was for women and men to have the same opportunities in life, they’d simper, “Well, things ARE equal.” Now they’re seeing what your generation fought so hard for.
Katydid, yeah, my mom got divorced when I was 10, and I remember her fighting like crazy to get a credit account at one of our local department stores.
Fortunately, all her high school friends were still around and all of them, both male and female, had her back. She was always included in the bridge club, etc. She got some rental property in the divorce settlement and so was able to afford a small house in a really good school district; so I got a good education starting in fifth grade. (I was a crappy student in college, but I have no one but myself to blame for that.)
Question: When was it that women in the US couldn’t open their own bank accounts? In Israel, my parents always had separate bank accounts, at least since the late 1960s. As for credit cards, until the some point in the 1980s only the ultra-rich had them, but once banks decided to allow regular folks to have them that included people of all genders.
@ 15 Anat: My friend tried to open a bank account in her own name in conservative Lincoln Nebraska in about 1968. She was just out of college and had gotten a job as a research assistant. Her husband was a PhD student and not earning money. She was denied. She and her husband went to the bank across the street and asked for an account for her there. Had the bank said no, they were going to sue. Women had recently won the legal right to a bank account, but it took a while for the conservative locals comply.
I heard tell that both the women founders of American Girl Doll Company and a large software firm had trouble getting bank accounts when they started their firms around that same time.