Carroll’s defamation award
The jury in the defamation case E. Jean Carroll filed against Donald Trump handed down its verdict today.
A Manhattan jury on Friday ordered former President Donald J. Trump to pay $83.3 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her in social media posts, news conferences and even on the campaign trail ever since she first accused him in 2019 of raping her in a department store dressing room decades earlier.
The award included $65 million in punitive damages, which the nine-member jury assessed after finding Mr. Trump, 77, had acted maliciously after Ms. Carroll’s lawyers pointed to Mr. Trump’s persisting attacks on her, both from the White House and after leaving office.
(New York Times, January 26, 2024)
Trump dug his grave and kept digging
Last May, another jury found Trump liable for both raping and defaming Carroll. However, mere hours after announcing its verdict, Trump was all over the media defaming her again. For example, during a CNN town hall, he denounced her vindicated accusation as a fake, made-up story by a wack job he has never met.
Meanwhile, this might seem like an odd judicial process. But the presiding judge scheduled this trial for a separate jury solely to determine how much Trump is liable for – in compensatory and punitive damages. That’s the amount this jury announced today.
But, as his tirade during that CNN town hall demonstrated, Trump has shown utter contempt, not just for Carroll, but also for the judge, the jury, and the entire judicial process. He even stormed out during the plaintiff’s closing argument today.
This contemptuous behavior speaks volumes about how unfit Trump is to serve as president of the United States. Not that any voter with half a brain needed further proof. But only Trump would show this kind of contempt for the very jurors deciding his financial fate. “Stable genius“? Try unstable fool!
Trump: you’ll get paid only over my dead body
No other defendant would dare show the kind of contempt Trump has demonstrated during this trial. And if they did, none would expect to get away with it. But Trump fully expects to. Here’s why:
Trump clearly intends to treat this award the way Alex Jones has treated the $1.5 billion a jury awarded Sandy Hook families. He will use appeals, accounting gimmicks, estate planning, and even bankruptcy, if necessary, to avoid paying E. Jean Carroll a single cent.
Of course, Carroll has all kinds of debt collection tools at her disposal. But you need only look at the way Trump is stringing along prosecutors in his criminal cases to appreciate how he might toy with court-sanctioned debt collectors.
That’s why I fear Carroll will have to wait for Trump to die to collect from his estate. And she will be in a long line of other creditors he stiffed.
The problem, of course, is that Carroll is 80. So she might die before him. In which case, collection will pit her estate against his.
Even so, there is one way she could collect before she dies. In yet another case, a judge has already ruled that Trump built his real-estate empire on fraudulent practices “like nobody has ever seen.” That’s why the Trump Organization is now in receivership.
And you can bet the judge in this case is all too familiar with Trump’s tactics for avoiding paying his bills. So he might get fed up and order the receiver to sell a major asset (e.g., Trump Tower) to pay Carroll. Hey, hope springs eternal…
MAGA to the rescue
Trump boasts of having hundreds of millions in cash on hand. But anyone who knows anything about his MAGA grift knows he fleeced most of that cash from gullible political supporters.
And, like clockwork, he’s already soliciting them for money to appeal what he claims is a witch hunt, a persecution by Biden and politically motivated prosecutors. Of course, this conveniently ignores that Biden and the Democrats have about as much to do with Carroll’s defamation suit as you or I – which is to say, absolutely nothing.