Michael M. Santiago/Getty; Brynn Anderson/AP

Jurors in the defamation case against Donald Trump took less than three hours to decide that Trump should pay $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she claimed Trump raped her in the 1990s in a downtown New York City department store. A jury in a related trial last year determined that Trump was liable for the rape and concluded that he owed Carroll $5 million for denigrating her in public in the fall of 2022. This second trial relates to comments Trump made in 2019, when Carroll first went public with her story. At that time, Trump denied that he had ever even met her and said she was not his “type,” among other things. Carroll testified at both trials that Trump’s attacks unleashed an avalanche of online hatred, put her in fear for her life, and left her career and personal reputation in tatters.

In court on Friday, Carroll’s attorneys asked jurors to award her $24 million in damages in this case.

“One of the questions you have to decide is whether he acted with malice,” Shawn Crowley, a Carroll attorney, told the jurors during closing statements. “What could be more on-brand for Donald Trump than malice?”........

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