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What civil lawsuits have E. Jean Carroll and other accusers filed against Donald Trump and what were the outcomes?
Executive summary: E. Jean Carroll won two linked civil judgments against Donald Trump: a jury awarded $5 million for sexual abuse and defamation in the Southern District of New York, and a later damages award of $83.3 million for additional defamation claims, with appeals courts largely upholding those awards and rejecting presidential immunity defenses [1] [2]. Reported totals differ slightly in sources because of interest calculations and rounding—some outlets report $88.3 million or $89.7 million as cumulative amounts after interest [3] [2]. Other accusers have filed civil suits with mixed visibility and outcomes; some cases remain at early stages or lack public resolution in the provided material [4] [5].
1. How Carroll’s lawsuits unfolded and the twin judgments that mattered: E. Jean Carroll pursued two overlapping civil tracks: an initial claim under New York’s Adult Survivors Act and later defamation claims tied to Trump’s post-accusation public statements. A jury in the Southern District of New York found Trump liable for sexual abuse (but not rape under the jury’s legal framing) and for defaming Carroll, awarding $5 million in May 2023; that judgment survived appellate review [6] [1]. A subsequent trial focused on damages for statements Trump made while president in 2019 and afterward; that proceeding produced the $83.3 million award predominantly in punitive damages, which an appeals panel upheld in September 2025 and explicitly rejected Trump’s presidential-immunity argument [7] [8]. The two proceedings together created the bulk of the civil financial liability against Trump in Carroll’s matters.
2. Appellate rulings: immunity defenses and proportionality debates: Appeals courts scrutinized the record and concluded that presidential immunity did not bar Carroll’s defamation claims arising from public statements, allowing state and federal judgments to stand. A three-judge panel described the defendant’s conduct as sufficiently reprehensible to justify large punitive awards and found the district court’s rulings on evidence and damages to be within legal bounds [8] [2]. Trump’s requests for en banc rehearing and other appellate relief were rejected in the provided accounts, which note the courts found the jury’s damages awards reasonable in light of ongoing harassment Carroll reported [3] [7]. Sources differ on the final arithmetic after interest, reflecting routine post-judgment calculations rather than substantive disputes over liability [2] [3].
3. Conflicting totals and why numbers vary in reports: The reporting shows $5 million from the first jury and $83.3 million from the later damages trial; some outlets sum those to $88.3 million, while one report including accumulated interest lists $89.7 million, illustrating how post-judgment interest and statutory add-ons change headline totals [3] [2]. The appellate decisions cited describe punitive components—$65 million of the larger award in at least one account—explaining why the second judgment was unusually large relative to compensatory damages [8]. Differences in reporting dates and whether interest through a particular day is included account for the modest discrepancies across sources; all accounts provided, however, agree on the core holdings that Trump was held liable and that appellate courts largely affirmed those findings [7] [1].
4. Other accusers and parallel civil actions: a scattered landscape: Beyond Carroll, the provided material identifies other plaintiffs such as Summer Zervos, Alva Johnson, and a case captioned Katie Johnson v. Donald J. Trump in California, but these accounts do not uniformly report final outcomes or consolidated verdicts [5] [4]. Some sources summarize that multiple women have brought suits alleging sexual misconduct and defamation, but the documentation here either predates final judgments or focuses on Carroll as the only case resulting in multi-million-dollar awards in the cited record [5] [3]. The disparate posture of these other suits—some dismissed, some in discovery, some settled or unresolved in public records—means Carroll’s two judgments stand as the clearest civil resolutions in the provided materials.
5. What the records say about evidence, standards, and implications: Appellate write-ups emphasize that courts allowed testimony from other women and the 2005 recorded remarks as relevant evidence in Carroll’s trials, and that any trial errors alleged by defense counsel were treated as harmless by the appeals court—factors that buttressed the judgments [1]. Judges and juries applied state tort standards for battery and defamation, distinguishing criminal labels like “rape” from civil findings of sexual abuse; that legal nuance explains why the verdicts hold Trump civilly liable without criminal adjudication [6] [7]. The sources collectively show the legal pathway by which high-profile public statements by a former president were treated as actionable in civil court and how appellate courts have constrained immunity defenses in those contexts [2] [3].