Judge denies Trump relief from $83.3 million defamation judgment
NEW YORK – The federal judge who oversaw a New York defamation trial that resulted in an $83.3 million award to a longtime magazine columnist who says Donald Trump raped her in the 1990s refused Thursday to relieve the ex-president from the verdict’s financial pinch.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan told Trump’s attorney in a written order that he won’t delay deadlines for posting a bond that would ensure 80-year-old writer E. Jean Carroll can be paid the award if the judgment survives appeals.
The judge said any financial harm to the Republican front-runner for the presidency results from his slow response to the late-january verdict in the defamation case resulting from statements Trump made about Carroll while he was president in 2019 after she revealed her claims against him in a memoir.
At the time, Trump accused her of making up claims that he raped her in the dressing room of a luxury Manhattan department store in spring 1996. A jury last May at a trial Trump did not attend awarded
Carroll $5 million in damages, finding that Trump sexually abused her but did not rape her as rape was defined under New York state law. It also concluded that he defamed her in statements in October 2022.
Trump attended the January trial and briefly testified, though his remarks were severely limited by the judge, who had ruled that the jury had to accept the May verdict and was only to decide how much in damages, if any, Carroll was owed for Trump’s 2019 statements. In the statements, Trump claimed he didn’t know Carroll and accused her of making up lies to sell books and harm him politically. wide failures by police during the 2022 attack and reiterated rippling missteps that the Justice Department and state lawmakers have previously laid bare. Nearly 400 law enforcement agents, including Uvalde Police Department officers, rushed to the scene of the shooting but waited more than an hour to confront a teenage gunman armed with an Arstyle rifle.
But an investigator hired by Uvalde officials found that the city’s officers did not deserve punishment, and in some cases, praised their actions during one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history. The presentation prompted an eruption of anger among some of the victims’ family members, who also scolded the investigator for leaving the room before they had a chance to address him.
“You said they did it in good faith. You call that good faith? They stood there 77 minutes,” said Kimberly
Mata-rubio, whose daughter was among those killed in the attack, after the presentation ended.
Jesse Prado, an Austin-based investigator and former police detective who made the report for the Uvalde City Council, began his presentation by describing the failures by responding local, state and federal officers at the scene that day: communication problems, poor training for live shooter situations, lack of available equipment and delays on breaching the classroom.
Sweden officially joins NATO, ending decades of post-world War II neutrality
WASHINGTON – Sweden on Thursday formally joined NATO as the 32nd member of the transatlantic military alliance, ending decades of post-world War II neutrality and centuries of broader non-alignment with major powers as security concerns in Europe have spiked following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
President Joe Biden congratulated Sweden on its admission and said it was a sign that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Ukraine had united, rather than divided, the alliance.
“When Putin launched his brutal war of aggression against the people of Ukraine, he thought he could weaken Europe and divide NATO,” Biden said in a statement, which he is expected to echo in his State of the Union address to Congress later Thursday.
“Instead, in May 2022, Sweden and Finland – two of our close partners, with two highly capable militaries – made the historic decision to apply for full NATO membership,” Biden said. ”With the addition of Sweden today, NATO stands more united, determined, and dynamic than ever– now 32 nations strong.”
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Secretary of State Antony Blinken presided at a ceremony in which Sweden’s “instrument of accession” to the alliance was officially deposited at the State Department.