Appeals Court Upholds $83.3 Million Judgement Against Trump

By Jacob Weindling | September 8, 2025 | 10:33am

Photo by Alex Kent/Getty Images

Trump Administration e. jean carroll

Appeals Court Upholds $83.3 Million Judgement Against Trump

In 2019, the writer E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of raping her in a dressing room at the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1996. She is one of 26 women to come forward and allege that a man who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein in the 1990s perpetrated some form of sexual harassment, assault or rape against them. “A jury found that then-President Trump acted with common law malice when he made defamatory statements about Carroll in June 2019 and awarded compensatory and punitive damages,” wrote the United States second court of appeals today in their unanimous judgement denying Trump’s appeal and awarding Carroll $83.3 million in damages.

Carroll sued Trump twice, once for statements he made while he was president (Carroll I), and once for statements he made after he left office (Carroll II). The second lawsuit was tried first, and as today’s unanimous judgement notes, “The jury found that Trump had indeed sexually assaulted Carroll and that he defamed her in statements he made after he left office.”

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Trump argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, which gave him unprecedented broad-based immunity that functionally doesn’t make him that much different from a King, shielded him from liability in this case. The second district found that “Trump has failed to identify any grounds that would warrant reconsidering our prior holding on presidential immunity.”

This is just another example of Trump’s abject lawlessness, and outside a Supreme Court filled with rank political hacks pretending to be judges, he has had countless rulings go against him. His vision of America is entirely antithetical to any form of law-abiding society, and as he bragged in the famed Access Hollywood tape, his vision of the rule of law in this country is “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab ‘em by the pussy.” That is almost quite literally what E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of doing to her in 1996, and between Trump’s own admission and the rulings in this defamation case, there is absolutely no reason to disbelieve her allegation.