A United States federal court has ruled that former President Donald Trump will have to pay damages of 83.3 million dollars (almost 77 million euros) to the journalist E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of having seriously damaged the his reputation by denying that he sexually assaulted her. Carroll had asked for compensation of 10 million dollars: the sentence therefore awarded him a much larger amount.
Carroll had already won a civil lawsuit for sexual abuse against Trump last year, and had then sued him for various statements that the former president had made in 2019, when the case emerged: it was Carroll herself who made it public, with an article on New York Magazine in which she said she had been raped by Trump 23 years earlier. Trump had defined her accusation as “totally false”, but after Carroll’s victory in the other trial the conditions had been created for damage to one’s image, and therefore also for compensation.