E. Jean Carroll on Trump’s $83 Million: ‘Not Going to Waste a Cent’

E. Jean Carroll talked about her $83 million victory over Donald Trump and facing the former president in court in a new interview days after the jury awarded her in the defamation lawsuit.

Speaking to the New York Times, Carroll said of the $83 million — $7.3 million in compensatory damages, $11 million in reputation repair damages, and $65 million in putative damages — Trump must pay her, “I’m not going to waste a cent of this. We’re going to do something good with it.”

The author added, “I can’t say what they are yet. We will all talk and come up with a great plan,” while acknowledging that, given Trump will appeal the damages, it could be years before she sees the money.

In 2019, Carroll accused Trump of assault, alleging that the former president raped her in the dressing room of New York’s Bergdorf Goodman department store in the Nineties. Originally, Carroll filed a defamation suit over statements Trump made about her in the aftermath of her accusation. In 2022, she filed a separate lawsuit alleging additional defamatory statements by Trump, and a charge of battery under New York’s Adult Survivors Act. In the trial that took place last year, litigating her 2022 lawsuit, Trump declined to attend or even present a defense and was found liable on both counts. 

Trump was initially ordered to pay Carroll $5 million last May, but a judge found that he continued to defame Carroll in rally speeches and online missives, resulting in the latest decision against him, which the jury made after only three hours of deliberations.

“I felt they were my brothers and sisters on that jury,” Carroll told the New York Times of the jurors. “They were like me. They were New Yorkers.”

As for facing Trump at trial, Carroll said she was initially anxious about it but upon seeing him in court, “He’s like nothing in front of me.” “When you’ve actually faced the man, he’s just a man with no clothes on,” Carroll said. “It’s the people around him that are giving him the power.”

She continued, “This win, more than any other thing, when we needed it the most — after we lost the rights over our own bodies in many states — we put out our flag in the ground on this one. Women won this one. I think it bodes well for the future.”

Carroll quipped that she would use Trump’s money to make one immediate personal purchase: Better dog food for her pets.