President Trump on Friday posted a $91.6 million bond as he appeals the E. Jean Carroll judgment.
The money will be returned to Trump if he wins his appeal.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee on Thursday denied Trump’s second request to delay paying Carroll.
CNBC reported:
Former President Donald Trump on Friday appealed a civil defamation verdict in favor of writer E. Jean Carroll, and posted a $91.6 million bond as he asked to avoid having to pay damages he owes her as he pursues that appeal.
The appeal came days before Trump faced a deadline to pay $83.3 million in damages to Carroll for defaming her in 2019, when as president, he first denied her allegation that he had raped her in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s.
The $91.6 million bond he posted is meant to secure that damage award in the event his appeal of January’s jury verdict fails. Trump will get the money from the bond back if he wins his appeal.
In January, a 9-person jury ordered Trump to pay a total of $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for statements he made defending himself against false rape accusations.
The Trump team argued that the evidence Carroll deleted proves that she was receiving threats before President Trump ever commented on her allegations.
Judge Kaplan defended Carroll and said Trump offered no evidence that he ever attempted to recover the deleted messages.
“Mr. Trump has offered no evidence that he ever even attempted to recover any of these messages through discovery or otherwise,” Kaplan said, according to NBC News. “In fact, he does not even argue that the messages in question have been permanently lost and are now unrecoverable. This failure alone was sufficient basis to deny the alternative relief he sought.”
Kaplan also said that even if Trump’s claims about E. Jean Carroll’s deleted messages are accurate, it’s still not sufficient to warrant relief.
“Even if it is accurate, it is far from sufficient to warrant relief,” Kaplan said in the 30-page decision on Wednesday.
President Trump appeared in court in January as E. Jean Carroll testified in a trial where the jury will decide how much Trump has to pay for his so-called ‘defamatory’ statements about her.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee, previously ruled that Trump is liable for defamatory statements he made about E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of rape.
In 2019, E. Jean Carroll alleged Donald Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s.
Trump has denied the allegations and called E. Jean Carroll a “whack job” who’s “not my type.”
Under cross-examination by Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba, E. Jean Carroll admitted she deleted emails under subpoena.