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Trump attorney Alina Habba may have made up a fake person to push her arguments in the former president's defamation case, the lawyer for columnist E. Jean Carroll alleges.
In a Tuesday letter to the judge presiding over the defamation trial, Carroll's attorney, Roberta Kaplan, raised her concerns that Habba used a fake person to promote her accusations that she and the judge had a conflict of interest.
A day earlier, Habba had demanded Judge Lewis Kaplan (no relation to Roberta) provide "all of the relevant facts" related to an alleged mentorship between him and Carroll's lawyer. The federal judge and attorney had previously both worked at the Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison law firm in Manhattan during the early 1990s. The allegations came days after a jury awarded Carroll $88.3 million in damages from Trump.
In her Tuesday letter denying the accusations, Carroll's lead counsel said that what she was most concerned about was where Habba received the information of an alleged conflict of interest, suggesting that the Trump attorney made up a fake source.
Newsweek reached out to Habba via email for comment.
"Both the New York Post and Ms. Habba purport to cite the recollections of an 'unnamed partner at Paul Weiss,'" Carroll's lawyer wrote, adding, "that partner (if he even exists) clearly has a very flawed memory about events that occurred three decades ago."
Habba claimed in a Monday letter that the alleged relationship would have impacted the trial, saying that it played a factor in the judge's "displayed preferential treatment towards Plaintiffs counsel." The New York Post also published a story supporting Habba's claims and quoted a former partner from the Manhattan law firm as saying, "Lew was like her mentor."
In the letter, Carroll's lawyer denied a "mentor-mentee relationship" with the judge, pointing out the size of the law firm, which currently employs over 1,000 lawyers and has offices in several cities, and their short overlap at the firm. She had joined the firm in October 1992, and the federal district judge was confirmed to his post in August 1994.
"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," Kaplan told the judge. "While this strategy has now moved into its post-verdict phase, it is now time for Defendants' false and vexatious claims of bias or impropriety to stop."
Update 1/30/24, 12:26 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information and to reflect that Newsweek reached out to Alina Habba for comment.
About the writer
Katherine Fung is a Newsweek senior reporter based in New York City. She has covered U.S. politics and culture extensively. ... Read more