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Alina Habba, the attorney representing Donald Trump in the E. Jean Carroll defamation cases, backed off her comments about a potential conflict of interest after a threat of sanctions from Carroll's lead attorney.
Carroll has won two civil defamation cases against the former president after he claimed on multiple occasions that her allegation that he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store changing room in the mid-1990s was a lie. A jury last week ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million in damages.
That amount includes $7.3 million in compensatory damages, $11 million for reputational repair, and $65 million in punitive damages. Trump was previously ordered to pay the former Elle columnist $5 million in damages last year in another civil defamation trial stemming from a denial he made about her claims in 2022.
On Monday, Habba questioned if a conflict of interest existed between Carroll's lead attorney, Roberta Kaplan, and the judge presiding over the case, Lewis Kaplan (no relation). She cited a New York Post story with one anonymous source claiming that the future judge served as the lawyer's mentor when they both worked at the same law firm in the early 1990s.
In a three-page letter on Tuesday, Roberta Kaplan vehemently denied any such relationship, calling the allegation "utterly baseless" and said she had no memories of ever interacting with Lewis Kaplan during their time at the firm.
"From the very start of the recently concluded trial, Donald Trump and Ms. Habba 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," Roberta Kaplan wrote. "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."
In response to the letter, in which Roberta Kaplan also threatened to pursue sanctions, Habba said in her own letter to the judge that she was only "seeking to inquire" about the potential relationship and stressed that her earlier letter contained no allegations. She also said that the matter had "seemingly been resolved."
Newsweek reached out to Habba's office via email for comment on Tuesday afternoon.
Habba wrote in the Tuesday letter: "Contrary to Ms. Kaplan's contention, there are no 'false allegations of a 'mentor-mentee relationship between Your Honor and [Ms. Kaplan]' contained in my January 29 letter. The purpose of the letter was simply to inquire as to whether there is any merit to a recently published New York Post story which reported on the alleged existence of such a relationship...To be clear, this claim originated solely from the New York Post, where it was purportedly sourced from a 'former Paul Weiss partner who asked not to be named.'"
She continued: "I played no part in uncovering this information; have never communicated with the unnamed Paul Weiss partner; and have no personal knowledge as to whether the information contained in the article is true or false. As I stated in my January 29 letter, I 'learned for the first time' about the purported mentor-mentee relationship from the New York Post...Although I am quoted in the article, my statements were given in response to the reporter's request for comment (which, per the article, was also sought from Kaplan Hecker & Fink)."
Update 1/30/24, 3:10 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
About the writer
Thomas Kika is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in upstate New York. His focus is reporting on crime and national ... Read more