Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at Greensboro Coliseum on March 2, 2024 in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Alex Wong | Getty Images News | Getty Images
A New York judge on Thursday rejected a bid by Donald Trump to delay a $83.3 million civil defamation judgment in favor of writer E. Jean Carroll.
The ruling means that Trump by Monday must pay Carroll, or post a bond or assets as collateral against the judgment while appealing a jury’s verdict in January that as president he defamed her after she accused him in 2019 of rape.
The judgment is just one of three civil damages awards against Trump, who owes a total of $540 million to the New York state attorney general and Carroll, while on track to become the Republican presidential nominee.
Trump had asked Manhattan federal court Judge Lewis Kaplan to pause the latest Carroll case judgment until after he rules on post-trial motions.
His attorney Alina Habba in a filing Wednesday requested a delay “until three business days after the Court rules on his stay motion.”
But Kaplan, in his denial order Thursday, wrote that Trump’s “current situation is a result of his own dilatory actions.”
“He has had since January 26 to organize his finances with the knowledge that he might need to bond this judgment, yet he waited until 25 days after the jury verdict” to ask for a pause in the judgment, Kaplan wrote.
The judge also rejected an argument from Trump’s lawyers that he would suffer “irreparable injury” if he was forced to post a bond for the full judgment because he would have to pay non-recoverable fees.
“The expense of ongoing litigation in the absence of a stay does not constitute ‘irreparable injury’ in the relevant sense of that term,” the judge wrote.
In a statement blasting Kaplan’s order, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said, “This is a continuation of a totally lawless witch hunt.”
“President Trump filed a timely motion to stay the ridiculous judgment, and many courts, including the Second Circuit [federal appeals court], recognize the importance of temporary administrative stays while such motions are considered,” Cheung said.
“We look forward to continuing to litigate the case and to complete vindication of the truth.”
Zak Sawyer, a spokesman for Carroll’s lawyers, declined to comment.
Trump in another Manhattan federal civil trial last year was found to have sexually abused Carroll in an attack in the mid-1990s, and defamed her in comments he made in 2022, nearly two years after leaving the White House.
He later posted $5.6 million in cash as collateral while he appealed the jury verdict ordering him to pay her $5 million in that case.
Both last year’s trial and the most recent trial related to Carroll’s claim that Trump raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan after a chance meeting there in the 1990s.
Trump denied raping the writer, and claimed she had made up her allegation to promote sales of a book she was writing, and to harm him politically.
Trump last month was ordered by a state court judge to pay a $454 million judgment in a civil business fraud lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
He has not yet been forced to pay that amount or put up collateral to secure the judgment in the fraud case. But that soon could change if an appeals court declines to stay the judgment.
