President Trump on Friday secured a bond worth nearly $92 million, covering the colossal judgment awarded to writer E. Jean Carroll in her recent defamation lawsuit. 

The bond, which ensures payment of the judgment if Ms. Carroll ultimately prevails in the appeals process, prevents her from collecting on the judgment, which is enormous for a defamation case, while Mr. Trump appeals. His defense attorneys filed the notice of appeal to the Court of Appeals Second Circuit on Friday.   

“Due to the numerous prejudicial errors made at the lower level, we are highly confident that the Second Circuit will overturn this egregious judgment,” a defense attorney, Alina Habba, said in a statement to ABC News. 

The Federal Insurance Company that posted the bond for Mr. Trump is part of Chubb, one of the largest insurance companies in the world with “operations in 54 countries and territories” and “$225 billion in assets and reported $57.5 billion of gross premiums written in 2023,” according to its website. Not disclosed is what kind of collateral Mr. Trump provided the insurance company in return for the bond. 

In most cases, bond companies receive a premium, a percentage of the bond apart from the collateral for the full amount. Regardless, whether defendants win or lose their appeal, these premiums are nonrefundable.     

“President Trump respectfully requests that this Court recognize the superseding bond obtained by President Trump in the sum of $91,630,000.00 and approve it as adequate and sufficient to stay the enforcement of the Judgment, to the extent that the Judgment awards damages, pending the ultimate disposition of President Trump’s appeal,” Ms. Habba wrote in Friday’s filing.

Because the district court requires a bond issuer to post 110 percent of the judgment in question, the amount is higher than the $83.3 million awarded to Ms. Carroll on January 26.    

Ms. Carroll sued Mr. Trump for defamation in 2019, after she published an excerpt from her upcoming book in New York magazine. The excerpt detailed an alleged encounter with Mr. Trump at a high-end department store, Bergdorf Goodman, in late 1995 or early 1996. Ms. Carroll wrote that she went to the lingerie floor with Mr. Trump to help him pick out a gift, and once there, he shoved her into a dressing room and raped her. Mr. Trump has fiercely denied these charges.      

Shortly after the salacious story exploded in the press, Mr. Trump called Ms. Carroll a liar, said he had never met “this woman,” and that she was not his “type.” In response, the former advice columnist said that being called a liar by a sitting president ruined her credibility, severely damaging her career, and turned her life upside down. Her resulting lawsuit for defamation was held up in the court system for four years.  

Eager to be heard by the courts, Ms. Carroll filed a second civil lawsuit in 2022, after New York state, in the wake of the #metoo movement, passed the Adult Survivors Act, which temporarily lifted expired statutes of limitations for survivors of sexual assault. Ms. Carroll sought damages for the decades-old rape accusation and for other defaming statements by Mr. Trump. A jury found the former president liable for sexual assault and defamation in May 2023, and awarded Ms. Carroll $5 million. That verdict is also being appealed.   

Yet it was the giant defamation award for the first lawsuit, which finally reached the courtroom in January, that shocked everyone, including Ms. Carroll. After several days of contentious hearings, many of which Mr. Trump attended — though he was not allowed to refute the rape allegations, which the judge said were settled fact due to the success of Ms. Carroll’s other lawsuit — the jury awarded the writer $83.3 million. 

On February 23, the defense asked the district court judge, Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw both trials, to pause the enforcement of the judgment until “30 days after the resolution of President Trump’s post-trial motions,” which the attorneys would submit no later than March 7. 

Ms. Habba called the damages “plainly excessive,” and argued there was a “strong probability” that the amount would be reduced or eliminated on appeal.

Judge Kaplan gave the plaintiff a chance to raise objections, and Ms. Carroll’s lawyers responded promptly, urging the judge to deny the request. In her letter, Ms. Carroll’s lead attorney, Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge), compared the defense’s claim — that Mr. Trump could and would pay, were he to be found guilty by an appeals court — to be worthless.

“He simply asks the Court to ‘trust me’ and offers, in a case with an $83.3 million judgment against him, the court filing equivalent of a paper napkin; signed by the least trustworthy of borrowers,” Ms. Kaplan wrote.   

“Mr. Trump offers no alternative means other than his own unsubstantiated say,” Ms. Kaplan added in her March 4 letter, “so that he will have $83.3 million available when Carroll prevails on appeal.”      

The battle continued. On Tuesday, the defense asked the court for a new trial, arguing that “the Court’s restrictions on President Trump’s testimony were erroneous and prejudicial.” By not permitting Mr. Trump to explain “his own mental state,” when he made defamatory statements about Ms. Carroll, the court “dramatically” restrained “the scope of President Trump’s testimony [and] almost certainly influenced the jury’s verdict, and thus a new trial is warranted,” Ms. Habba said.

She further reiterated her request to pause the enforcement, or to extend the deadline until a higher court had ruled, or until Mr. Trump was granted a new trial, insisting that posting a bond now would “impose irreparable injury in the form of substantial costs (which may or may not be recoverable).” 

The judge denied the defense’s request on Thursday. Although the legal standards by which “administrative stays” are governed “are relatively obscure and ill-defined,” the judge wrote, the court found no “threat of irreparable injury.” 

“Trump’s current situation is the result of his own dilatory actions,” the judge ruled. Mr. Trump, he said, had since “January 26 to organize his finances,” but he waited until the very last minute to stall the payment.   

“The expense of ongoing litigation in the absence of a stay does not constitute ‘irreparable injury’ in the relevant sense of that term,” Judge Kaplan concluded. 

In a Substack post, Ms. Carroll called the bond “stupendous.” Her attorney, Ms. Kaplan, may not be “strong enough to yank a golden toilet out of the floor at Trump Tower and toss it through the window,” the writer expressed, but “this bond saves Robbie the trouble of showing up with U.S. Marshals on Monday to do so.”

Mr. Trump, who has to secure another, much larger bond for another hefty damage award from the recent civil fraud trial, told Fox News on Tuesday that he has “a lot of money.” 

When a co-host, Brian Kilmeade, asked the former president if he was at all concerned about securing almost half a billion dollars to appeal the verdict in the lawsuit brought against him by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t worry about anything. I don’t worry about the money.”

The $454 million judgment increases by $111,984 in interest daily. 

If the Court of the Appeals accepts the Carroll defamation case, which is likely, Mr. Trump will have had four trials at Lower Manhattan within one year.