Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at Greensboro Coliseum on March 2, 2024 in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Alex Wong | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Donald Trump on Thursday lost a bid to delay paying an $83.3 million civil defamation judgment to writer E. Jean Carroll.
The ruling by Manhattan federal Judge Lewis Kaplan means Trump by Monday must either pay that amount to Carroll, or put up a bond or assets to cover the value of the judgment while he appeals the verdict that he defamed Carroll 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 an order Thursday rejected that request, writing that Trump’s “current situation is a result of his own dilatory actions.”
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.
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