Here's How Much Money Is At Stake In Donald Trump's Second Court Battle With E. Jean Carroll

Donald Trump has been out on the 2024 presidential campaign trail, but he has taken time off to attend various trials that he's involved in. The most recent case is the defamation lawsuit brought against Trump by E. Jean Carroll, a journalist and author. Trump showed up briefly for the jury selection in his latest trial in New York, the day after he won the primaries in Iowa. That jury will be deciding how much Trump has to pay Carroll for defamation. They aren't deciding if he defamed her — Judge Lewis Caplan ruled in September 2023 that Trump had made defamatory statements about Carroll. So the jury will be deciding how much, if anything, he has to pay for said defamation, which could be upwards of $10 million. The $10 million figure is what Carroll is requesting in compensatory damages, but she has also asked for punitive damages. Punitive awards are harder to win, but New York state has no limit on how much can be awarded as compensation either. 

The $10 million alone would be double the amount that Trump has already been sentenced to pay Carroll. A separate civil sexual assault and defamation case, sometimes referred to in court documents as "Carroll II," was held in May 2023, and a jury found that Trump was liable for sexual abuse and defamation of Carroll. They determined that he should pay Carroll $2.02 million for the sexual abuse and $2.98 million for defamation. Trump and his lawyers are currently appealing the verdict in that case.

Let's rewind and look at how all this came about and why Trump might be required to pay Carroll over $10 million once the current trial comes to an end. In 2019, Carroll publicly alleged that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the 1990s. Trump responded with denials of ever having met her and called her a liar. She sued him for defamation for statements that he made about her in June 2019 — in what's now known as the "Carroll I" lawsuit in a number of court documents related to the two cases. Trump's legal team tried to have the "Carroll I" case dismissed, citing immunity since he'd made some of the comments noted in the lawsuit while he was president; a federal appeals court denied that request.

Carroll sued him a second time for defamatory statements made in October 2022 as well as for sexual abuse — the "Carroll II" lawsuit. That lawsuit was possible because of the Adult Survivors Act in New York, passed in May 2022, which provided a one-year window for sexual assault survivors to bring a civil case against their abusers, no matter how long ago the abuse happened. That was the case that was settled with the May 2023 verdict. But after the verdict, Trump continued to publicly claim Carroll was lying, including at a CNN Town Hall. Carroll was allowed to add those CNN comments to her "Carroll I" defamation lawsuit.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the May 2023 verdict in "Carroll II" and the ongoing "Carroll I" lawsuit, Donald Trump has continued to attack E. Jean Carroll. Trump often uses his social media platform Truth Social to do so, including a series of posts trying to discredit Carroll on the trial's first day. In one post, he called the case a "witch hunt," a "hoax," and called the judge a "bully." Trump's continued denials and insults seem to explain why Carroll is seeking punitive damages into the multi-millions. With a high enough price tag, she and her lawyers are hoping Trump's attacks on her will stop.

As the two face each other in court again for the "Carroll I" lawsuit, Carroll has taken the stand while Trump is in the courtroom. "I'm here to get my reputation back and to stop him from telling lies about me," Carroll testified, per The Guardian.

Trump's appearance in court has caused a stir. Similar to how a judge had to tell Trump to keep quiet as a witness testified during his New York fraud trial, Judge Lewis Kaplan had to tell Trump to keep quiet during Carroll's testimony so the jury couldn't hear him. There's a possibility that Trump will take the stand in this trial, although he didn't in the first Carroll trial.