Trump secures £70m bond clearing way to appeal in defamation case
A lawyer for the former president filed papers in New York showing he had secured a bond big enough to cover the multi-million dollar award.
Former President Donald Trump has secured a bond sufficient to support an 83.3 million US dollars (£64.8 million) jury award granted to writer E Jean Carroll during a January defamation trial stemming from rape claims she made against Trump, his lawyer said on Friday.
Lawyer Alina Habba filed papers with the New York judge to show that Mr Trump had secured a 91.6 million dollar (£71.6 million) bond from the Federal Insurance Company.
She simultaneously filed a notice of appeal to show Mr Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential front-runner, is appealing the verdict to the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.
The filings came a day after Judge Lewis A Kaplan refused to delay a Monday deadline for posting a bond to ensure that the 80-year-old Carroll can collect the multi-million dollar award if it remains intact following appeals.
The posting of the bond was a necessary step to delay payment of the award until the 2nd Circuit can rule.
Mr Trump is facing financial pressure to set aside money to cover both the judgment in the Carroll case and an even bigger one in a lawsuit in which he was found liable for lying about his wealth in financial statements given to banks.
A New York judge recently refused to halt collection of a 454 million dollar (£353 million) civil fraud penalty while Mr Trump appeals.
He now has until March 25 to either pay up or buy a bond covering the full amount.
In the meantime, interest on the judgment continues to mount, adding roughly 112,000 dollars (£87,000) each day.
Mr Trump’s lawyers have asked for that judgment to be stayed on appeal, warning he might need to sell some properties to cover the penalty.
On Thursday, Judge Kaplan wrote that any financial harm to Mr Trump results from his slow response to the late-January verdict in the defamation case over statements he made about Ms Carroll while he was president in 2019 after she claimed in a memoir that he raped her in spring 1996 in a midtown Manhattan luxury department store dressing room.
Mr Trump vehemently denied the claims, saying that he did not know her and that the encounter at a Bergdorf Goodman store across the street from Trump Tower never took place.
A jury last May awarded Ms Carroll 5.0 million dollars (£3.89 million) after concluding that Trump sexually abused Carroll in the 1996 encounter, though it rejected Carroll’s rape claims, as rape was defined by New York state law.
A portion of the award also stemmed from the jury’s finding that Trump defamed Carroll with statements he made in October 2022.
The January trial pertained solely to statements Trump made in 2019 while he was president.
Judge Kaplan instructed the jury that it must accept the findings of the jury last May and was only deciding how much, if anything, Mr Trump owed Ms Carroll for his 2019 statements.
Mr Trump did not attend the May trial, but he testified briefly and regularly sat with defence lawyers at the January trial, though his behaviour, including disparaging comments that a lawyer for Ms Carroll said were loud enough for jurors to hear, prompted Judge Kaplan to threaten to banish him from the courtroom.
