ASIA ONE
NEW YORK — A lawyer for Donald Trump on Tuesday (Jan 30) backed off her suggestion that the judge who oversaw E. Jean Carroll’s two successful civil defamation trials against the former US president might have had a conflict of interest.
In a letter to US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan, Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba said she was satisfied that the judge and Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who is not related, did not have a “mentor-mentee relationship” when they worked at the same law firm three decades ago.
Habba had on Monday suggested that such a relationship might have tainted the US$83.3 million (S$111.74 million) jury award that Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, won against Trump last Friday.
She cited a Jan 27 New York Post article that quoted an unnamed former partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison as saying Judge Kaplan had been “like a mentor” to Roberta Kaplan when both worked for about two years at the firm.
In a letter on Tuesday, Roberta Kaplan called it “utterly baseless” to suggest there had been such a relationship, and said she might seek sanctions if Habba kept making “false accusations of impropriety.”
Habba indicated that Kaplan’s letter appeared to settle the matter.
“The point of my January 29 letter was to verify whether the information contained in the New York Post article is accurate,” she wrote. “Since Ms Kaplan has now denied that there was ever a mentor-mentee relationship between herself and Your Honour, this issue has seemingly been resolved.”
A spokesperson for Roberta Kaplan declined to comment.
Trump plans to appeal the US$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.
