NEW YORK — A federal appeals court has granted President Donald Trump temporary relief from paying an $83 million defamation judgment to columnist E. Jean Carroll, according to Tuesday’s court filing.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals approved a request from Trump’s legal team to postpone the payment to Carroll until the Supreme Court can either review the case or decline to hear an appeal. However, the court mandated that Trump secure a $7.4 million bond to account for potential additional interest charges, as Carroll’s legal team had requested.
Last month, the appeals court denied Trump’s petition for the full 2nd Circuit to conduct a rare en banc hearing regarding an appeal of a three-judge panel’s confirmation of the January 2024 jury verdict.
Following that denial, Trump’s attorney Justin D. Smith petitioned the 2nd Circuit to halt enforcement of its ruling that upheld the monetary award, preventing Trump from being compelled to pay before the Supreme Court could weigh in on a potential appeal.
Smith argued last week that there exists a “fair prospect” the Supreme Court would rule favorably for Trump, who has characterized Carroll’s allegations—first revealed publicly in 2019 regarding a claimed sexual assault in a Manhattan department store dressing room during spring 1996—as a “made up scam.”
The $83 million judgment awarded to the 82-year-old Carroll resulted from a jury trial where Trump provided brief testimony and displayed notable courtroom conduct over multiple days.
When affirming the verdict, a 2nd Circuit panel noted in September that Trump persisted in his public statements against Carroll for no less than five years, with attacks becoming “more extreme and frequent as the trial approached.”
“He also continued these same attacks during the trial itself,” the appeals court stated. “In one such statement, issued two days into the trial, Trump proclaimed that he would continue to defame Carroll ‘a thousand times.’”
The jury had been directed to accept the conclusions of a previous jury that awarded Carroll $5 million in May 2023, after determining Trump sexually abused her at the department store and subsequently defamed her following her account’s publication in a 2019 book.
Trump contests the $83 million judgment on multiple legal grounds, claiming “absolute immunity” for statements made during his presidency when he denied knowing Carroll and questioned her motives, suggesting they were politically motivated or intended to publicize her memoir.
