Judge orders Trump’s $5m damages be released to E Jean Carroll

A judge has ordered that writer E Jean Carroll be paid the more than $5m (£3.7m) US President Donald Trump owes her after he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming her in a civil case three years ago.

Judge Lewis Kaplan on Wednesday ordered that a clerk release the money – with interest – from an account where Trump deposited it after the ruling.

Trump was pushing to delay the $5.8m payment to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision not to hear an appeal of the case.

In May 2023, a New York jury awarded Carroll the damages over her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s, and then branded the incident a hoax on social media. Trump denied the allegations.

A spokesman for Trump’s legal team on Wednesday said: “The American People stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes.”

“President Trump will keep winning against Liberal Lawfare, as he continues to focus on his mission to Make America Great Again,” the spokesman said.

Carroll, a former magazine columnist who is now 82, accused Trump of attacking her in the mid-1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan, and later defaming her on Truth Social in a 2022 post denying her allegations.

Trump put the damages into a court-controlled account shortly after the verdict, and it was held there while the appeals process played out. The judge did not say when the funds would be released to Carroll.

The president has repeatedly claimed that the judge who oversaw the civil trial, Lewis Kaplan, improperly allowed evidence to be presented that negatively affected how the jury viewed Trump.

A federal appeals court agreed with the jury’s verdict last year and said Kaplan did not make errors that would warrant a new trial.

Trump has also appealed another jury’s decision in 2024 finding the president liable for defaming Carroll in a separate instance and awarding her nearly $84m. A panel of federal judges denied his appeal against that decision last year.