Left: Journalist E. Jean Carroll departs from the courthouse after the conclusion of the damages trial against Donald Trump at Manhattan Federal Court on Friday, January 26, 2024 in New York City. (John Angelillo, Alamy Live News via AP). Right: Republican former President Donald Trump speaks at a primary election night party in Nashua, N.H., Jan. 23, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke.)
For a third time, lawyers for Donald Trump wish to delay paying an $83.3 million court-ordered defamation award to writer E. Jean Carroll, this time arguing her lawyers have been “clearly inconsistent” with their positions on whether Trump has the wealth to secure bond for the award, making the writer’s worries over whether Trump can be trusted to pay out, moot.
Last week, Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan excoriated the former president’s delay tactics, saying his second proposal toward the end of last month for an unsecured stay of the payment was the “court filing equivalent of a paper napkin” and that it was utterly impossible for the writer or her lawyer to merely “trust” that Trump would pay without something to bind him to the deal. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, had already denied one previous attempt by Trump to reduce bond or stay the payment.
In response to Trump’s latest request, the judge issued a single-page, terse order.
“On Friday, Feb. 23, the defendant moved for an unsecured or partially secured stay on the plaintiff’s judgment pending the disposition of post-trial motions. No post-trial motions have been filed yet. Moreover, briefing of the defendant’s stay motion was not completed until the late afternoon of March 2, 2024. Nevertheless, the court is aware of defendant’s request for a decision on the stay motion no later than today ‘to allow time for [him] to finalize arrangements for an appropriate bond if necessary,” Kaplan wrote. “A decision will be rendered as promptly as is reasonably possible. Without implying what that decision will be, or when it will be made, however, it will not come today.”
Through her attorneys, Carroll has claimed Trump has failed to provide any information about his finances or the location of his assets, failed to specify what percentage of his assets are liquid or how she can go about the process of collecting what is owed to her.
“He doesn’t even acknowledge the risks that now accompany his financial situation, from a half-billion dollar judgment obtained by the New York Attorney General [Letitia James] to the 91 felony charges that might end his career as a businessman permanently. He simply asks the court to ‘trust me’ and offers in this case, with an $83.3 million judgment against him, the court filing equivalent of a paper napkin, signed by the least trustworthy of borrowers,” Roberta Kaplan wrote.
In response to that this weekend, Trump’s lawyers Alina Habba and John Sauer wrote in their 13-page reply memorandum in support of the stay:
Plaintiff’s current position — that President Trump’s ability to satisfy a judgment of $83.3 million is in doubt — is ‘clearly inconsistent’ with her position barely one month ago that President Trump has $14 billion in assets and can thus easily satisfy an enormous punitive award.
Carroll is relying on “double-hearsay, speculative news articles alleging facts outside the record to imply that President Trump’s financial situation is precarious — contradicting her own trial evidence,” Habba and Sauer wrote.
The lawyers offered two alternatives in the meantime: the court should give Trump an unsecured 30-day delay to pay until all post-trial motions are resolved, or allow the former president to post a reduced bond totaling a little over $24.4 million.
“But even if the Court does not grant an unsecured stay during this period when the risk to the plaintiff is ‘minimal,’ it should, at very least, grant a partially secured stay in an amount substantially reduced from the $91.63 million otherwise required. Remitting the $7.3 million award and the $65 million punitive award, as discussed above, would reduce the bond amount of $24.475 million, which would be more than sufficient to secure any minimal risk to the plaintiff,” the reply memorandum states.
Previously, Trump has acknowledged that under court direction he would file any remaining post-trial motions by March 7.
Trump is facing huge financial pressures. He was recently ordered to pay a $464 million fine for his extensive civil fraud that involved lying about valuations for his properties in order to secure favorable loans and insurance contracts. Trump said it was impossible to post the full $464 million appeal bond in that case as well, despite bragging at trial that his estate in Mar-a-Lago is worth $1 billion.
That claim is inconsistent, ironically, with the value determined by tax assessors: somewhere between $18 million to $37 million.
