A federal judge has ordered President Donald Trump to pay the damages awarded to writer E. Jean Carroll after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled Wednesday that Trump must pay the $5 million judgment, along with nearly $800,000 in accrued interest.
In his order, Kaplan said Trump’s efforts to delay payment had run their course.
“In the last analysis, defendant has been stalling this case for years,” the judge wrote. “A jury unanimously concluded that he sexually abused and defamed plaintiff and awarded her damages accordingly. The judgment on that verdict has been upheld on appeal. En banc rehearing has been denied. The Supreme Court has denied certiorari without dissent.”
“It is time for him to ‘do equity’ and pay the judgment,” Kaplan added.
A New York jury found Trump liable in 2023 for sexually abusing Carroll in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman during the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 after publicly denying her allegations.
The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages.
A separate jury later ordered Trump to pay Carroll an additional $83 million in damages in a related defamation case. That judgment, however, remains under appeal.
The latest ruling follows the Supreme Court of the United States’s decision last month to decline Trump’s appeal of the original verdict, leaving the lower court’s judgment in place.
Trump’s legal team had sought to postpone payment by requesting an administrative stay from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
The appeals court rejected that request in a brief order issued Wednesday, clearing the way for Carroll to receive the awarded damages.
The Second Circuit had previously rejected Trump’s broader appeals in the case, and the Supreme Court’s refusal to review the matter effectively exhausted his legal options regarding the $5 million judgment.
The ruling was issued while Trump was attending the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, where he was participating in meetings with allied leaders.
