In a stinging rebuke to former US President Donald Trump, a jury ordered him to pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll on Friday for his social media attacks against the longtime advice columnist after she claimed he sexually assaulted her in a department store in Manhattan.

The total amount Trump has to pay to Carroll amounted to $88.3 million after a separate jury ordered him to pay $5 million in a sexual assault and defamation case.

Carroll argued that the former President destroyed her reputation as a trustworthy journalist by denying he raped her. The sum that the former US president was ordered to pay far exceeded the minimum $10 million Carroll had sought. Trump called the verdict "absolutely ridiculous" and promised to appeal the decision.

The 80-year-old Carroll clutched her lawyers' hands and smiled as seven-man, two-woman jury delivered its verdict and was seen sharing a weepy three-way hug with her attorneys. 'This is a great victory for every woman who stands up when she's been knocked down, and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep a woman down," she said in a statement issued through a publicist.

Trump had attended the trial in Manhattan earlier in the day, but stormed out of the courtroom during closing arguments read by Carroll's attorney. He returned for his own attorney's closing argument and for a portion of the deliberations, but left the courthouse a half hour before the verdict was read. "Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon," he said after the verdict.

Carroll claimed that flirtatious, chance encounter with Trump in 1996 at Bergdorf Goodman's Fifth Avenue store ended violently, when he slammed her against a dressing room wall, pulled down her tights and forced himself on her. Carroll's case became an issue in Trump's campaign to retake the White House in the November election, as he is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

The former Elle magazine advice columnist sued Trump in November 2019 over his denials five months earlier that he had raped her in mid-1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.