Trump will pay millions to the journalist he dragged into the fitting room in 1996

The New York Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of the first instance of Donald Trump, ordering him to pay 83.3 million dollars to writer and journalist Elizabeth Jean Carroll for defamation amid allegations of rape, as reported by AFP and Reuters.

It's about a civil trial in January 2024, when a jury found Trump guilty of defaming a former Elle magazine columnist who accused him of a sexualized crime in the 1990s.

The jury recognized Donald Trump's intention to "harm" Elizabeth Jean Carroll. On Monday, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan rejected Trump's argument that the January 2024 sentence should be overturned because he deserved presidential immunity in a lawsuit filed by Carroll.

"The amount of compensation correctly awarded by the jury is reasonable, given the extraordinary and serious facts of this case," the panel of three judges unanimously decided.

Elizabeth Jean Carroll, now 81, a former columnist for Elle magazine, previously accused Trump of assaulting her in the Bergdorf Goodman fitting room in 1996. Trump initially denied everything. In June 2019, he told a reporter that the journalist was "not his type" and that she had invented this story to sell her memoirs, "Why do We Need Men?"