A New York jury has ordered Donald Trump to pay former magazine columnist E Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages for defamation, causing him to have a costly start to 2024.
In the mid-1990s, in the dressing room of Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman department store, the front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination was found guilty of sexually abusing Ms. Carroll. She first made this accusation against him in her memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, which was released in 2019 while he was president.
The jury in a second civil trial decided last week that Mr. Trump should pay Ms. Carroll a sum far in advance of the $10 million she and her attorney Roberta Kaplan had requested as compensation for the reputational damage she had suffered, as a result of Mr. Trump’s smears having caused her to receive a barrage of abusive messages and death threats from his supporters. Mr. Trump’s subsequent denials, claiming never to have even met his accuser and insisting she was not his “type,” ultimately led to his denials, which eventually resulted in his denials.
The nine-member jury gave Ms. Carroll compensatory damages over $18.3 million in addition to $65 million in punitive damages.
Furthermore, Mr. Trump’s scenario may be about to get much worse as he seeks a second term in the White House while facing 91 felony charges and four criminal indictments. The outcome of this case could be even more financially damaging for the seasoned luxury real estate tycoon and Apprentice host. The verdict is expected in a Big Apple court case.
In the civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization, state attorney general Letitia James and Mr. Trump, along with his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and their top aides, are accused of regularly inflating or overestimating the value of company assets between 2011 and 2021 in order to get favorable loans and insurance deals from lenders. Judge Arthur Engoron is expected to render a decision in this case.
Even though the accused are denying any misconduct, Mr. Trump has been attacking Judge Engoron and Ms. James on social media on frequently, falsely accusing them of political bias. This is not going to win him over to the guy who is reviewing the evidence against him.
So can he afford it?
According to Forbes magazine, Trump’s net worth was approximately $2.6 billion as of September 2023, which is a significant amount from the $40 million he reportedly inherited from his late father, Fred Trump. Although this is a slight increase, in a sense it is true. That’s less than the $3.2 billion his fortune was estimated to have in 2021, or the $4.5 billion he was worth in 2015, the year before he died after winning the presidency.
The financial magazine valued Mr. Trump’s holdings as follows: social media and brand businesses ($160m), non-NYC real estate ($190m), cash and personal assets ($640m), golf clubs and resorts ($870m), and New York City real estate ($690m).
According to report, Mr. Trump only has $426 million in cash and liquid assets out of the $2.6 billion total, which he might use to settle his legal debts.
Based on this, Bloomberg has calculated that a $453.3 million bill would completely consume his liquid assets and reduce his net worth by up to 15%.
It is challenging to determine the true extent of Mr. Trump’s wealth, though, in light of the fact that he consistently refused to open his books to scrutiny while he was a presidential candidate in 2016 and during his one-term in office from 2017 to 2021, incorrectly claiming he was under to an Internal Revenue Service audit.
Even if such were the case, Mr. Trump would not have been deterred from seeking transparency in the Oval Office, nor from adopting the same stance as his predecessors.
Naturally, if Judge Engoron rules against him, the Republican will be furious and will file an appeal. He has already started looking for new lawyers, but that might not keep the money out of escrow while the appeals process is continuing.
Although none of his super PACs, Make America Great Again or Save America PAC, are thought to have nearly the money needed to pay for the damages he would be forced to pay, he may have expected that they would bail his out.
Meanwhile, former federal prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers told Bloomberg that since there are no “exceptions that would cover a damages award for a matter not involving him as a candidate or officeholder,” Mr. Trump would not be permitted to use the campaign funds of his PACs to pay his legal fees in these cases.