The nearly $92 million bond former President Donald Trump proposed to block advice columnist E. Jean Carroll from pursuing his assets was approved by a New York federal court Tuesday.
The bond, which Carroll’s legal team didn’t object to after Trump’s team agreed to a slight modification of the details, will prevent her from collecting on her $83.3 million defamation trial win against the Republican national frontrunner while the appeal Trump filed on Friday runs its course. The bond is designed to ensure Carroll will be able to collect on the judgment if Trump loses his appeal.
The major win for Carroll came after a judge limited the January trial to the issue of damages, ruling that a separate jury’s verdict in May that Trump had sexually abused Carroll in the 1990s and then defamed her in 2022 meant two lengthy denials he issued as president in 2019 were also defamatory. In those denials, which were made soon after Carroll came forward with her sexual assault allegations, Trump said she is “trying to sell a new book” and “people should pay dearly for such false accusations.”
Carroll’s legal team argued at trial that, with his 2019 statements, Trump unleashed his followers to go after Carroll and it was now his turn to “pay dearly” for what he has done. They urged jurors to hit the self-proclaimed billionaire with punitive damages that were large enough to get him to stop defaming Carroll.
Even during the trial, in which Carroll testified to receiving death threats and sleeping with a gun near her bed, Trump continued attacking her on social media, including posting that he “NEVER TOUCHED HER, OR IN ANY WAY WOULD WANT TO TOUCH HER,” despite having previously confused Carroll in a photograph for his former wife, Marla Maples.
