Donald Trump on Thursday lost a bid to delay paying an $83.3 million civil defamation judgment to writer E. Jean Carroll.
The denial of Trump’s request by Manhattan federal court Judge Lewis Kaplan means the former president by Monday must either pay that amount to Carroll, or put up a bond or assets to cover the value of the judgment while appealing a jury’s verdict in January that he defamed her after she accused him of rape.
Trump had asked Kaplan to delay the judgment from taking effect until after he rules on post-trial motions in the case.
In a court filing Wednesday, Trump attorney Alina Habba had asked the court for a delay “until three business days after the Court rules on his stay motion.”
Kaplan in his order Thursday rejected that request, writing 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.
He also rejected an argument from Trump’s lawyers that the ex-president 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.
A spokesman for Carroll’s lawyers declined to comment.
Habba did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In addition to the Carroll case, Trump also has been ordered to pay a $454 million judgment in a civil business fraud lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump has not yet been forced to pay that amount or put up collateral to secure the judgment. But that soon could change if an appeals court refuses to stay the judgment.
Trump, who is the presumptive Republican nominee for president, in another Manhattan federal civil trial last year was found to have sexually abused Carroll and defamed her in comments he made in 2022.
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 in the mid-1990s raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan after a chance meeting at that department store.
Trump denied raping the writer, and alleged she had made up the claim in order to promote sales of a book she was writing and to harm him politically.
Read the full article here
