NEW YORK - Former US president Donald Trump was ordered by a Manhattan jury on Jan 26 to pay US$83.3 million (S$112 million) to writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her in social media posts, news conferences and even in the midst of the trial ever since she first accused him in 2019 of raping her in a department store dressing room decades earlier.

Her lawyers argued that a large award is necessary to stop Trump from continuing to attack her. The award included US$65 million in punitive damages, which the nine-member jury assessed after finding that Trump, 77, acted maliciously after her lawyers pointed to his persistent attacks on her, from the White House and after leaving office.

On a single day recently, he made more than 40 derisive posts about her on his Truth Social website.

Trump had already left for the day when the dollar figures were read aloud. Hearing the numbers, his lawyers slumped in their seats. The jury was dismissed, and Ms Carroll, 80, embraced her lawyers. Minutes later, she walked out of the courthouse arm-in-arm with her legal team, beaming for the cameras.

“This is a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep a woman down,” she said in a statement, thanking her lawyers effusively.

During the trial, Ms Carroll testified that Trump’s repeated taunts and lashing out mobilised many of his supporters, leading to an onslaught of attacks on social media and in her e-mail inbox that frightened her and “shattered” her reputation as a well-regarded advice columnist for Elle magazine.

“I was attacked on Twitter,” she told the jury. “I was attacked on Facebook. I was living in a new universe.”

The verdict came as Trump faces a series of civil and criminal cases and is seeking to return to the White House. During the trial, he alternated campaign stops in New Hampshire, where he won the Republican presidential primary, with court appearances, using them as an opportunity to reach voters and complain that he had been mistreated.

He appeared in court on most days during the trial.

It is the second time Trump has been ordered to pay Ms Carroll damages in less than a year. In May, a different Manhattan jury awarded her US$5 million after finding him liable for sexually abusing her in the dressing room in the mid-1990s, and defaming her in a post on his Truth Social website in October 2022, in which he called her accusation “a complete con job” and “a hoax and a lie”.

On Jan 26, Ms Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Ms Carroll, asked the jury in a crisp and methodical summation to award her client at least US$24 million to help her repair her reputation and compensate her for the emotional harm Trump inflicted with his attacks.

Ms Kaplan also asked the jury to award substantial punitive damages to deter him from continuing to attack Ms Carroll. Ms Kaplan did not specify an amount, but noted that Trump, in an excerpt from a video deposition played for the jury, estimated that his brand alone was worth “maybe US$10 billion” and that he placed the value of various of his real estate properties at US$14 billion.

“Donald Trump is worth billions of dollars,” Ms Kaplan told the jury.

“The law says you can consider Donald Trump’s wealth as well as his malicious and spiteful continuing conduct in making that assessment,” she said, adding: “Now is the time to make him pay for it, and now is the time to make him pay dearly.”

Trump did not hear those words. After scoffing, muttering and shaking his head throughout the first few minutes of Ms Kaplan’s closing argument, he rose from the defence table without saying anything, turned and left the 26th-floor courtroom. Ms Kaplan continued to address the jury as if the stark breach of decorum had not happened.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is not related to Ms Carroll’s lawyer, said: “The record will reflect that Mr Trump just rose and walked out of the courtroom.”

A clutch of reporters rushed to catch him outside. A sketch artist began drawing his exiting of the courtroom. Later, a juror leaned forward and looked expectantly at the door.

He returned about 75 minutes after he left, when his lawyer, Ms Alina Habba, offered her summation.

Trump’s lawyers tried to cast Ms Carroll as a fame-hungry writer who was trying to raise a diminishing profile when she wrote in 2019 of an encounter more than two decades earlier that she said traumatised her for decades.

Ms Habba argued that Ms Carroll’s reputation, far from being damaged, improved as a result of his statements. And she said Ms Carroll’s lawyers had not proved that the deluge of threats and defamatory statements the writer received were a response to Trump’s statements.

Outside the courthouse, Ms Habba combined complaints about how Judge Kaplan had handled the case with sloganeering, echoing Trump’s claims that he was being ill-treated by a corrupt system. “We did not win today,” she told reporters, “but we will win.”

Lawyer Kaplan said the verdict “proves that the law applies to everyone in our country, even the rich, even the famous, even former presidents”.

Judge Kaplan, who presided over both trials, had ruled that the jury’s findings in May 2023 would carry over to the current one, limiting the second jury’s focus solely on damages.

Trump was not allowed to stray beyond that issue in his testimony. On Jan 25, the judge, out of the jury’s presence, asked Ms Habba for a preview of that testimony. “I want to know everything he is going to say,” he said.

In the end, Trump, by his actions and words, was his own worst enemy. During the trial, he attacked Ms Carroll online and insulted her last week at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. Inside the courtroom, the judge warned him that he might be excluded after Ms Carroll’s lawyers complained that he was muttering “con job” and “witch hunt” loudly enough for jurors to hear.

Another of Ms Carroll’s lawyers, Mr Shawn G. Crowley, rejected Ms Habba’s contention that Trump’s statements did not prompt the threats Ms Carroll received.

“He gets to lie,” Mr Crowley said. “He gets to threaten. He gets to ignore a jury verdict. He gets to defy the law and the rules of this courtroom. You saw how he has behaved through this trial. You heard him. You saw him stand up and walk out of this courtroom while Ms Kaplan was speaking. Rules don’t apply to Donald Trump.” NYTIMES