Donald Trump has suffered an expensive start to 2024 with a New York jury ordering him to pay $83.3m to the retired magazine columnist E Jean Carroll for defamation.
The front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination was found liable last year for sexually assaulting Ms Carroll in the dressing room of Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, an accusation she first levelled against him in her memoir What Do We Need Men For?, which was published during his presidency in 2019.
Mr Trump’s subsequent denials, claiming never to have even met his accuser and insisting she was not his “type”, ultimately led to a second civil trial that ended last week with the jury deciding he should pay Ms Carroll a sum far in advance of the $10m she and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan had asked for as compensation for the reputational damage she had sustained, Mr Trump’s smears having caused her to receive a deluge of abusive messages and death threats from his supporters.
The nine-member jury awarded Ms Carroll $65m in punitive damages plus more than $18.3m in compensatory damages.
What’s more, things could be about to get a whole lot worse for Mr Trump, with a verdict imminent in another Big Apple court case that could prove even more financially damaging for the veteran luxury real estate tycoon and Apprentice host as he seeks a second stint in the White House with four criminal indictments and 91 felony charges hanging over his head.
Judge Arthur Engoron is expected to deliver a judgment in the civil fraud trial brought against the Trump Organization by state attorney general Letitia James accusing Mr Trump, his sons Donald Jr and Eric and their chief associates of routinely inflating or overestimating the value of company assets between 2011 and 2021 in order to secure favourable loans and insurance deals from lenders.
While the accused deny any wrongdoing, Mr Trump has repeatedly attacked Judge Engoron and Ms James on social media, baselessly accusing them of political bias in a move that is unlikely to endear him to the man weighing up the case against him.
Ms James is seeking $370m plus interest in financial penalties to make things right and should the justice side with her and award the full amount, the Republican could be ordered to pay out an astronomical $453.3m in one week.
So can he afford it?
According to Forbes, Mr Trump’s net worth stood at around $2.6bn as of September 2023, which is a considerable amount and some advance on the $40m he is said to have inherited from his late father Fred Trump but also some way short of the same outlet’s $3.2bn estimation of his worth in 2021 or the $4.5bn he was worth in 2015, the year before he won the presidency.
The financial magazine arrived at the total by valuing Mr Trump’s portfolio accordingly: golf clubs and resorts ($870m), New York City real estate ($690m), cash and personal assets ($640m), non-NYC real estate ($190m) and social media and brand businesses ($160m).
Of that $2.6bn total, Forbes calculates that Mr Trump has only $426m in cash and liquid assets with which he would be able to pay off his legal obligations.
On that basis, Bloomberg has estimated that a bill for $453.3m would swallow up his liquid assets and eat into his net worth by as much as 15 per cent.
It is difficult to be sure about the real extent of Mr Trump’s fortune, however, given that, when he was running for president in 2016 and throughout his single term in the White House between 2017 and 2021, he repeatedly refused to open his books for public scrutiny, falsely claiming he could not do so because he was under audit by the Internal Revenue Service.
Even if that was true, there was nothing to stop him from making the same commitment to transparency as his predecessors in the Oval Office, which did not stop Mr Trump from insisting otherwise.
The Republican will, of course, angrily appeal both verdicts (assuming Judge Engoron does not find in his favour) and has already begun shopping around for new lawyers, although that may not save him from having to put the money in escrow while the appeals process plays out.
He might have hoped to be bailed out by either his Save America PAC or Make America Great Again super PAC, although neither is believed to have anything like the funds required to cover the damages he could be asked to pay.
Jennifer Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor, has meanwhile told Bloomberg that Mr Trump would not be allowed to use his PACs’ campaign funds to pay his legal fees in these cases because there are no “exceptions that would cover a damages award for a matter not involving him as a candidate or officeholder”.
Source: Independent
