The panel of six men and three women also found that Trump injured advice columnist Carroll in a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman dressing room and defamed her when he called her a liar.

Carroll was awarded about $5m in compensatory and punitive damages: about $2m on the sexual abuse count and close to $3m for defamation, for branding her a liar.

After the verdict, as she was escorted to a car, Carroll said: “We’re very happy.”

Trump’s spokesman, Steven Cheung, said on Tuesday that the former president would appeal. That means he will not have to pay the awarded damages so long as the case is on appeal.

Carroll had accused the former US president of s**ually assaulting her in a New York City department store in the mid-1990s and then defaming her by dismissing her story – told in a 2019 memoir – as a “con job”.

Trump has been accused of s**ual misconduct or assault by more than two dozen women, but this has so far been the only case to end up before a jury, casting another shadow over Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign.