A New York jury found on Tuesday that Donald Trump s**ually abused the advice columnist E Jean Carroll in a New York department store changing room 27 years ago.
The verdict was read out in a Manhattan federal court on Tuesday afternoon, just hours after jurors began deliberating following a seven-day civil trial.
The panel of six men and three women also found that Trump injured advice columnist Carroll in a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman dressing room and defamed her when he called her a liar.
Carroll was awarded about $5m in compensatory and punitive damages: about $2m on the sexual abuse count and close to $3m for defamation, for branding her a liar.
They ruled after just three hours of deliberation that the evidence did not show that Trump had r*p*d her. But did find him liable for s**ual abuse.
After the verdict, as she was escorted to a car, Carroll said: “We’re very happy.”
Trump’s spokesman, Steven Cheung, said on Tuesday that the former president would appeal. That means he will not have to pay the awarded damages so long as the case is on appeal.
Carroll had accused the former US president of s**ually assaulting her in a New York City department store in the mid-1990s and then defaming her by dismissing her story – told in a 2019 memoir – as a “con job”.
In a post on Trump’s social media app Truth Social he wrote in all caps, ‘I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS. THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE – A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!’
Trump has been accused of s**ual misconduct or assault by more than two dozen women, but this has so far been the only case to end up before a jury, casting another shadow over Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign.