President Trump will not get a second trial in the civil sexual assault and defamation case brought against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll.

A jury at New York found that the former president sexually assaulted her in a dressing room in the upscale department store Bergdorf Goodman sometime in the 1990s and has awarded her tens of millions of dollars in damages. Most of the damages were not for the assault itself but for defamation after Mr. Trump called Ms. Carroll names and derided the case as “a total con job.”

Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over Ms. Carroll’s suit against Mr. Trump, ruled on Thursday that the former president is neither entitled to a new trial nor a review of the damages awarded to Ms. Carroll by the jury. 

Judge Kaplan says Mr. Trump relies on unconvincing legal arguments and precedent to demand a new trial. “Mr. Trump’s argument is entirely without merit both as a matter of law and as a matter of fact,” the judge wrote. 

Ms. Carroll was awarded nearly $100 million total for both the assault and Mr. Trump’s statements about her, which the jury deemed defamatory. For emotional and reputational damages against Ms. Carroll, as well as for punitive damages, Mr. Trump was ordered to pay Ms. Carroll $83.3 million on top of a $5 million payment that was ordered in May 2023 for the assault itself. He has already posted a more than $90 million bond with the court.  

Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that he has no idea who Ms. Carroll is and, famously, that she was “not his type.”

Judge Kaplan ruled Thursday that he would not revisit the size of the damages, saying that Ms. Carroll was correct in arguing that the money she is seeking from Mr. Trump is a reward for suffering years of emotional and reputational pain. 

“Ms. Carroll’s compensatory damages were not awarded solely for her emotional distress; they were not for garden variety harms; and they were not excessive, for all of the reasons stated in Ms. Carroll’s opposition brief,” Judge Kaplan writes. 

“We categorically disagree with Judge Kaplan’s decision,” Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, said in a statement to CBS News. “It ignores long-standing constitutional principles and is a prime example of the lawfare raging across this country. We are confident that this decision will be overturned by the Second Circuit.”

After the damages for sexual assault and defamation were awarded to Ms. Carroll in May 2023, Mr. Trump appeared at a CNN presidential candidate town hall and referred to her as a “whack job.” He said the trial was “rigged,” and he denied raping Ms. Carroll. “I didn’t do anything else, either,” he said. “I don’t know who the hell she is.”

He also made a range of comments about Ms. Carroll on his social media app, Truth Social, where he again claimed she was mentally unwell and that he had never met her. Those posts and his CNN appearance were used as evidence when Ms. Carroll sued him again for defamation. 

During the damages trial, Mr. Trump reposted sexually salacious postings Ms. Carroll — who wrote an advice column that often touched on sexual subject matter — had made on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter. Mr. Trump also claimed that Ms. Carroll had named her cat “Vagina.”

In March, Mr. Trump demanded a new trial because, he argued, the jury had faced an overwhelming amount of “‘confusion, speculation or prejudice’ as opposed to the ‘evidence presented at trial.’”

Judge Kaplan wrote in response that Mr. Trump’s demand for a new trial did not deal with the issue that the jury found unanimously that his statements about Ms. Carroll “were false, defamatory, and made with both actual and common law malice.”

“It ignores the fact that those defamatory statements were viewed between at least 85 to 104 million times” on Truth Social, the jurist wrote in his opinion.