CHESAPEAKE, Va. — Former President Donald Trump has used a Chesapeake-based company to post a $91.6 million bond Friday in the lawsuit brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll in New York.
According to court documents obtained by 13News Now, the source of the bond is the Federal Insurance Company, whose claim center is located at 600 Independence Parkway in Chesapeake. The company has another location in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey.
The bond will delay the payment of the award in the lawsuit trial, $83.3 million for Carroll stemming from rape claims she made against Trump, while he appeals the verdict to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Associated Press (AP) reports.
The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, hasn't approved the bond, online federal court records show.
The lawsuit stems from statements Trump made about Carroll while he was president in 2019 after she claimed in a memoir that he raped her in 1996 in a midtown Manhattan luxury department store dressing room, according to AP.
Trump vehemently denied the claims, saying that he didn’t know her and that the encounter at a Bergdorf Goodman store across the street from Trump Tower never took place.
A jury last May awarded Carroll $5 million after concluding that Trump sexually abused Carroll in the 1996 encounter, though it rejected Carroll’s rape claims, as rape was defined by New York state law. A portion of the award also stemmed from the jury’s finding that Trump defamed Carroll with statements he made in October 2022.
A January trial, which resulted in the $83.3 million award, pertained solely to statements Trump made in 2019 while he was president. Kaplan instructed the jury that it must accept the findings of the jury last May and was only deciding how much, if anything, Trump owed Carroll for his 2019 statements.
Trump did not attend the May trial, but he testified briefly and regularly sat with defense lawyers at the January trial, though his behavior, including disparaging comments that a lawyer for Carroll said were loud enough for jurors to hear, prompted Kaplan to threaten to banish him from the courtroom.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
