NEW YORK (Reuters) – The lawyer who helped the writer E. Jean Carroll defeat Donald Trump twice in civil defamation trials on Tuesday forcefully rejected a claim by the former president’s lawyer that the presiding judge might have had a conflict of interest.
Roberta Kaplan, who represents Carroll, called it “utterly baseless” to suggest U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is not related, had a “mentor-mentee relationship” with her when they worked three decades ago at the same law firm.
Carroll’s lawyer said she reserved the right to seek sanctions against Alina Habba, Trump’s lawyer.
Habba had raised the specter of a conflict of interest in a letter filed in the federal court in Manhattan on Monday.
She cited a Jan. 27 New York Post article about Judge Kaplan’s alleged prior working relationship with Roberta Kaplan, and suggested it might warrant overturning Carroll’s $83.3 million jury award.
In response, Roberta Kaplan said that while she and the judge overlapped for two years at the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in the early 1990s, she had no recollection of interacting with him.
“As Ms. Habba well knows, these allegations are baseless,” Kaplan wrote. “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.”
Habba did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Post article cited an unnamed former Paul Weiss partner who suggested that Judge Kaplan might have been a mentor to Roberta Kaplan.
Trump plans to appeal last Friday’s $83.3 million verdict, which stemmed from his June 2019 denials that he raped Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
A different jury last May awarded the former Elle magazine advice columnist $5 million, finding Trump liable for a similar October 2022 defamation and for sexual abuse.
Trump is appealing that verdict. The first jury’s findings were binding for the second trial, leaving the jury there to focus only on damages.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen and Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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