Donald Trump has been ordered to pay for his bullying behavior.
When most people are ordered to pay millions of dollars for defaming someone, they would typically learn their lesson and stop. However, this is not the case for Donald Trump. Last May, a jury in Manhattan ruled that he owed E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist, $5m in damages for sexually assaulting her nearly 30 years ago and then, in 2022, accusing her of making it up. Unfazed by the judgment, he called her a “whack job” on CNN the next day and denied ever having met her (even though they were photographed together). “I have no idea who the hell she is,” he protested.
Mr. Trump now has a significant new reason to control himself, thanks to a substantial judgment in a separate but related defamation trial. On January 26th, a different jury awarded Ms. Carroll $83m for another set of insults and denials over the assault, these ones made by Mr. Trump in 2019. Punitive damages represented four-fifths of the total—a sum clearly intended to deter the presumptive Republican nominee for president from defaming Ms. Carroll again. Her lawyers had asked for $24m in compensatory damages and “an unusually high punitive award”. Mr. Trump called the verdict “absolutely ridiculous!” in a social-media post and vowed to appeal. The sum may well be reduced: calculating reputational harm is inherently subjective. But at least for now the lesson appears to have sunk in. Mr. Trump made no reference to Ms. Carroll after the trial.
The case stems from an encounter at Bergdorf Goodman, a department store in New York, in the mid-1990s. Ms. Carroll alleges that, while they shopped in the lingerie department, Mr. Trump pushed her against a dressing-room wall and raped her. In 2019, she published a book publicly describing the attack for the first time. Mr. Trump said it never happened and accused her of trying to boost book sales, adding, “she’s not my type.” In 2022, Ms. Carroll sued him under a law that allowed sexual-assault victims a one-year window to bring claims outside…
2024-01-27 09:37:43
Original from www.economist.com