Donald Trump is probably kicking his past self, after E. Jean Carroll’s lawyers on Thursday used his previous testimony from a totally different legal trial to make their case for damages.
The Carroll trial is just to set damages, because presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan has already ruled that Trump defamed Carroll. Carroll is seeking at least $10 million in damages.
Her lawyers played a clip of Trump’s video deposition that he sat for last year, ahead of his bank fraud trial in New York. In the clip, Trump brags that his Doral resort in Miami “could be worth $2.5 billion by itself.”
In another clip, Trump claims that his value has only increased since becoming president. “Probably my most valuable asset … that’s the brand,” he said. “I became president because of the brand. I think it’s the hottest brand in the world.”
“I did an NFT deal the other day.… It sold out in less than a day,” he added, referring to some truly wild digital art of himself that he sold in late 2022.
These boasts could drive up the amount he will ultimately owe Carroll in damages. Legal analyst Lisa Rubin explained on MSNBC last week that the jury “is allowed to consider how much Donald Trump is worth.”
“If you’re trying to punish someone, if they only have $10 in their pocket, that’s very different than punishing someone who has hundreds of millions—if not billions—of dollars in their pocket.”
This latest exhibit is proof that Trump’s multiple legal trials are intertwined and what he says in one case can quickly doom him in another.
New York Attorney General Letitia James accused Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, the Trump Organization, and other company executives of fraudulently inflating the value of various real estate assets to get more favorable terms on bank loans. The judge presiding over that trial, Arthur Engoron, determined in September that Trump indeed committed fraud and ordered that all Trump’s New York business certificates be canceled, making it nearly impossible to do business in the state and effectively killing the Trump Organization.
But even though Trump isn’t worth as much as he claims, because his sworn statements put his value so high, he could end up owing Carroll a massive amount in damages. Her minimum of $10 million is already on the low end. Carroll’s expert witness Ashlee Humphreys, a Northwestern University marketing professor who analyzes social media trends, testified last week that the price to repair the harm caused by Trump’s defamatory comments could be as high as $12.1 million. And that doesn’t even include punitive damages.
Trump already owes Carroll $5 million in damages after a jury in May unanimously found him liable for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault.