US President-elect Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated in three weeks, will have to pay five million dollars to an author he sexually assaulted in the 1990s and defamed when she revealed the facts more than 20 years later, ruled on Monday by a New York appeals court.
On May 9, 2023, the federal civil court in Manhattan judged the 45e President of the United States responsible for a “sexual assault” on former press columnist Elizabeth Jean Carroll in a New York department store in 1996.
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This woman, now 81 years old, revealed in a book published in 2019 what she considered to be a rape, committed 23 years earlier in a fitting room by Donald Trump.
The Republican billionaire, who will be the 47th on January 20e President of the United States, had constantly attacked Elizabeth Jean Carroll by calling her a “crazy person” who allegedly set up a “phony deal”.
The civil court sentenced Donald Trump to five million US dollars in damages for sexual assault (CA$7.1 million) and for defamatory comments made in 2022, a verdict after which the billionaire appealed.
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“We have concluded that Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the court erred in its now-challenged decisions,” three New York appeals judges wrote in a public order on Monday, but for which there was no second trial.
Mme Carroll, who was notably a columnist for the magazine Elle in the United States, had obtained on January 26 from the federal civil court in New York the enormous sum of US$83.3 million (CA$119 million) for having been defamed by Mr. Trump, always regarding what was recognized by the courts as a sexual assault in the New York department store.
This separate case is also under appeal.
Since he was re-elected on November 5, Mr. Trump’s legal horizon has almost completely cleared with the abandonment of federal criminal proceedings, in particular for his alleged actions during his defeat in the November 2020 presidential election. .
But he remains sentenced to hundreds of millions of dollars in civil fines in the cases of Carroll and his Trump Organization group.
On May 30, Donald Trump was the first former American president to be criminally convicted by the local courts of New York State for hidden payments to a porn star made before the 2016 presidential election, which he won.
He failed to overturn this historic verdict on the basis of his immunity as a former president and elected president, but a New York judge has for the moment postponed the pronouncement of the sentence.
