Trump Lawyer Alina Habba Backtracks on Wild Allegation Against Judge in E. Jean Carroll Defamation Case

AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey

The jury may have issued a verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation complaint against former President Donald Trump, but the sparring between the lawyers continues unabated — including Trump’s attorney making an accusation of a conflict of interest that was swiftly withdrawn after Carroll’s attorney responded.

On Friday, a New York federal jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in damages — comprised of compensatory damages of $7.3 million for emotional harm and $11 million in “reputational repair,” plus $65 million in punitive damages — related to her accusations that Trump had sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s and then defamed her in comments he made denying the accusations, including verbal comments and social media posts he continued to make throughout the trial.

Last May, a New York jury found Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, and awarded $5 million in damages. Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan presided over both trials, and frequently clashed with Trump attorney Alina Habba, repeatedly admonishing her for attempting to argue Trump did not rape or assault Carroll after that had already been adjudicated, plus various flubs Habba made attempting to follow federal civil procedure rules for entering evidence.

Habba wrote a letter to the court Monday accusing Judge Kaplan of having a conflict of interest with Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (who coincidentally has the same last name but is no relation to the judge), citing a New York Post article that quoted an anonymous partner at the judge’s former law firm who claimed he had a “mentor-mentee relationship” with Roberta Kaplan.

Roberta Kaplan fired back Tuesday in a sharply-worded letter to the court, blasting Habba for making “false allegations” that were “utterly baseless.”

As Kaplan the attorney wrote in the letter, she and Kaplan the judge did work for the Paul, Weiss law firm, but their tenure overlapped by less than two years when she was “a very junior associate” and it was “more than thirty years ago.” Kaplan added, contrary to Habba’s accusations of a “mentor-mentee relationship,” the two Kaplans did not work closely together, or even together at all:

During that relatively brief period more than thirty years ago, I do remember the Paul, Weiss partners with whom I worked and none of them was Your Honor. More specifically, I have no recollection from that time period of ever interacting with Your Honor on a case, participating with Your Honor in a client or case-related meeting, or attending a court proceeding with Your Honor. In fact, I remember no direct interaction from that time period with Your Honor at all.

The Messenger’s Adam Klasfeld (formerly managing editor at Law&Crime) pointed out that Paul, Weiss is a massive New York firm with “nearly 1,000 attorneys” today.

Attorney Kaplan blasted Habba for framing her accusations as something she “learned for the first time” from the Post article, when the fact that both Kaplans had worked for Paul, Weiss had been “a matter of public record” for years, and raised questions about where exactly the Post got their mysterious Paul, Weiss partner to make that anonymous accusation in the first place.

Both Habba and her client “have pushed a false narrative of judicial bias so that they could characterize any jury verdict against Trump as the product of a corrupt system. While that strategy has now moved into its post-verdict phase, it is now time for Defendant’s false and vexatious claims of bias or impropriety to stop,” wrote attorney Kaplan, but there was absolutely no basis for Judge Kaplan to recuse himself under these facts, and “no basis to set either verdict aside,” referring to the $5 million verdict from the first trial and the latest $83.3 million verdict from Friday.

Attorney Kaplan concluded by condemning as “troubling” the “substance and timing of [Habba’s] false accusations of impropriety…on the part of E. Jean Carroll’s counsel or the Court.” Notably for the ex-president who is already on the hook for nearly $90 million in total damages, attorney Kaplan reserved rights to seek sanctions under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Habba responded in about two hours with her own letter, furiously backtracking on her previous accusations. She insisted that she had “played no part in uncovering the information” in the Post article, did not know the identity of the anonymous Paul, Weiss partner cited therein, and had “no personal knowledge whether the information contained in the article was true or false.”

Despite previously demanding a “fact-specific inquiry” in her original letter, Habba wrapped Tuesday’s letter by saying that the point of the first letter was “to verify whether the information contained in the New York Post article is accurate,” and “[s]ince Ms. Kaplan has now denied that there was ever a mentor-mentee relationship between herself and [Judge Kaplan], this issue has seemingly been resolved.”

Habba did add a footnote to her letter, declaring, “There are, however, various other issues relating to Court’s conduct, including potential bias hostility towards defense counsel, that will be raised in post-motion trials and on appeal.”