New York, NY – Former President Donald Trump has obtained a $91.6 million bond to cover the amount owed in a defamation lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, disclosed this information to the court on Friday. The bond, provided by Federal Insurance Co., a unit of Chubb insurance company, will cover the $83.3 million judgment in the lawsuit, along with interest.
Habba also filed a notice indicating that Trump, who is seen as the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee, plans to appeal the verdict. The posting of the bond was a necessary step to delay paying the award until the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reviews Trump’s legal challenge.
These filings were made after Judge Lewis A. Kaplan refused to extend the deadline for posting a bond, which was set for Monday. The purpose of the bond is to ensure that Carroll, who is 80 years old, can collect the judgment if it is upheld following any appeals.
Trump is facing financial pressure to set aside money for both the Carroll case judgment and an even larger one in which he was found to have lied about his wealth in financial statements submitted to banks. A New York judge recently declined to halt the collection of a $454 million civil fraud penalty while Trump appeals. He now has until March 25 to either pay this penalty or secure a bond that covers the full amount. Meanwhile, interest on the judgment continues to accumulate at a rate of approximately $112,000 per day.
In a separate case, a civil jury in New York found last May that Trump had sexually assaulted Carroll in 1996 in the dressing room of a high-end department store in Manhattan. Trump, age 77, vehemently denies these allegations, asserting that he did not know Carroll at the time and that the supposed encounter at Bergdorf Goodman never occurred.
The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages, compensating her for both the alleged sexual assault and the harm done to her reputation when Trump publicly claimed that she fabricated the attack to promote her memoir. In January, a second trial was held to determine the additional amount Trump might owe Carroll for derogatory comments he made about her in 2019 while he was president. Judge Kaplan instructed the jury to accept the earlier jury’s finding of sexual abuse.
During the May trial, Trump did not attend, but he briefly testified and sat periodically with his defense attorneys during the January trial. The judge even threatened to remove him from the courtroom for making critical comments about the case that could potentially be overheard by the jurors.