NEW YORK (NEWSnet/AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday upheld at $5 million jury verdict against Donald Trump, rejecting the former president’s claims that the award was excessive and the jury vindicated him by failing to conclude he raped a columnist in a dressing room in 1996.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said the award of compensatory and punitive damages to writer E. Jean Carroll for in the civil case is reasonable.

Trump’s lawyers had asked Kaplan to reduce the jury award to less than $1 million or order a new trial on damages. Lawyers said the jury's $2 million in compensatory damages granted for Carroll's sexual assault claim was excessive because the jury concluded Trump had not raped Carroll.

Kaplan wrote that the jury's unanimous verdict was almost entirely in favor of Carroll, except the jury concluded she had failed to prove Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law.”

He said the definition of rape is “far narrower” than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes and elsewhere.

Lawyers for Trump did not immediately comment Wednesday, but quickly amended their appeal of the trial to add the judge’s ruling.

Trump has countersued Carroll, saying he was defamed when she continued to assert after the verdict that she had been raped. He has continued to maintain that he did not encounter Carroll at the department store and that he didn't know her before she claimed in a 2019 memoir that he had raped her.

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