Donald Trump sentenced on appeal to pay $5 million for sexual assault and defamation

The American president-elect, Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated on January 20, will have to pay 5 million dollars (4.8 million euros) to an author whom he had sexually assaulted in the 1990s and defamed when she had revealed the facts more than twenty years later, a New York appeals court ruled on Monday, December 30.

On May 9, 2023, the federal civil court in Manhattan judged the 45^e President of the United States responsible for “sexual assault” on former press columnist Elizabeth Jean Carroll in a New York department store in 1996. This woman, now 81 years old, revealed in a book published in 2019 what she considered to be rape, committed twenty -three years earlier in a fitting room by Donald Trump.

The Republican billionaire, who must become the 47^e President of the United States, had constantly attacked E. Jean Carroll by calling her a “crazy”who would have mounted a “phony deal”.

The civil court had sentenced Donald Trump to 5 million dollars in damages for sexual assault (two million) and for defamatory comments made in 2022 (three million), a verdict which the billionaire had appealed. “We have concluded that Mr. Trump has not demonstrated that the court erred in its now-challenged decisions”wrote three New York appeals judges on Monday in an order made public, but for which there was no second trial.

First former president criminally convicted

E. Jean Carroll, who was notably a columnist for the magazine Elle in the United States, had obtained on January 26 from the federal civil court of New York the enormous sum of 83.3 million dollars for having been defamed by Donald Trump, still in relation to what was recognized by the courts as a sexual assault in New York department store. This separate case is also under appeal.

Since he was re-elected on November 5, Donald 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 local courts in 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.