A federal court found Donald Trump guilty, yesterday Friday, of defamation of E. Jean Carroll, in which he awarded damages totaling 83.3 million dollars.

The 80-year-old columnist and author filed a lawsuit against the former US president claiming he tarnished her name by denying in 2019 that he had raped her nearly three decades ago.

Trump called the decision “ridiculous” and said he would appeal. “It’s completely ridiculous,” the Republican tycoon commented in a post on the Truth Social platform, once again accusing the judicial authorities of a “witch hunt.”

Last May, another jury awarded the former Elle magazine columnist $5 million in damages, ruling that Trump sexually assaulted her inside a Bergdorf Goodman department store and defamed her in 2022, when she denied it happened.

Carroll was now seeking additional damages of at least $10 million. Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the trial, had already ruled that Trump defamed Carroll in 2019 and that he sexually assaulted her in the department store’s fitting rooms in the 1990s. The trial involved statements Trump made in June 2019. , when he was president of the United States. He had said at the time that he did not know Carol and that she was calling him a rapist to promote her memoir.