Former President Donald Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, is suggesting a retrial in the defamation lawsuit filed by New York writer, E. Jean Carroll against her client. This suggestion comes just three days after a New York jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in damages. Bloomberg Law reports that Habba expressed concerns about a supposed close professional relationship between US District Judge, Lewis Kaplan, and Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, who shares no relation with the judge, when both were attorneys at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Habba questioned the process of the trial in a letter to Judge Kaplan, stating, “If Your Honor truly worked with Ms. Kaplan in any capacity — especially if there was a mentor/mentee relationship — that fact should have been disclosed before any case involving these parties was permitted to proceed forward.”
Carroll publicly accused Trump in 2019 of raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. She filed a lawsuit against Trump for defamation when he responded to the claims, branding her a liar and stating she was not his “type.” Carroll was previously awarded $5 million in damages from a separate sexual-abuse trial against Trump last year.
Roberta Kaplan’s spokesman, Zak Sawyer, informed the New York Post that the lawyer and the judge had overlapping tenures at the aforementioned law firm for less than two years in the 1990s. Habba, on the other hand, frequently highlighted her disapproval about what she labeled as unfair treatment of herself and Trump during the course of the trial.
In her letter, Habba stated, “We believe, and will argue on appeal, that the court was overtly hostile towards defense counsel and President Trump, and displayed preferential treatment towards plaintiff’s counsel.” In addition to this, Habba criticized Roberta Kaplan, a revered figure in progressive circles for her role in a milestone Supreme Court victory for same-sex couples, for accepting funding for Carroll’s case from billionaire Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a Democratic Party donor.