The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has paid the writer and columnist Elizabeth Jean Carroll around five million euros after being found guilty of sexual abuse and defamation in a legal proceeding that dates back to the mid-1990s.
"Three years ago, a unanimous jury of nine people found President Trump liable for sexually assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll," Judge Lewis Kaplan indicated in a statement, further specifying that the author "has received payment for the damages awarded to her by the jury as a result of that verdict."
According to Bloomberg, the total sum —a compensation of 5.6 million dollars for damages, to which interest has been added— has finally been transferred to Carroll after having been blocked by the US judicial system.
The disbursement comes after Carroll's legal representatives requested the magistrate to release those funds, once the Supreme Court rejected a request by Trump to challenge the jury's verdict, an appeal that has also been filed and is still pending a response.
The origin of the case dates back to 2019, when Carroll first recounted the assault that, according to her testimony, she suffered at the hands of Trump in a fitting room at Bergdorf Goodman —a luxury department store in New York— in the mid-1990s. A New York jury found the facts to be credible in May 2023, a decision that resulted in an initial payment order of five million dollars for sexual abuse and defamation.
The writer subsequently filed a new defamation lawsuit against the then-occupant of the White House, who continued to comment on her, and a jury ordered him in January 2024 to pay more than 83 million dollars, an amount considered "fair and reasonable" by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.