Trials & Litigation
After sanctions menace, Trump lawyer in $83.3M defamation case drops battle declare stemming from BigLaw overlap
Alina Habba, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, speaks to the media exterior the New York Metropolis courthouse, the place Trump was testifying Nov. 6, 2023. (Photograph by Ted Shaffrey/The Related Press)
A lawyer for former President Donald Trump is backing away from a declare that an opposing lawyer and the choose in a defamation case involving author E. Jean Carroll had an undisclosed battle of curiosity.
Trump lawyer Alina Habba had told the New York Post she is going to attraction an $83.3 million verdict towards Trump partly as a result of the plaintiff’s lawyer and the choose each labored at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison within the Nineteen Nineties.
Habba mentioned in a Jan. 30 letter to U.S. District Decide Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York she is now happy that there was no “mentor-mentee relationship” between Kaplan and opposing lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who should not associated, after they labored at Paul Weiss.
Law360, Reuters and Bloomberg Law have protection.
Habba had raised the problem in a prior letter, main Roberta Kaplan to reply that the accusation of such a relationship was “completely baseless” and he or she reserved the appropriate to hunt sanctions if Habba continues her “false accusations of impropriety.”
“From the very begin of the not too long ago concluded trial, Donald Trump and Ms. Habba have pushed a false narrative of judicial bias in order that they may characterize any jury verdict towards Trump because the product of a corrupt system,” Kaplan wrote in her own letter to the choose.
Jurors awarded $83.3 million to Carroll on Friday within the author’s second defamation lawsuit towards Trump for denying her claims of sexual assault in a division retailer dressing room throughout two time durations—earlier than October 2022 and after a defamation verdict in Could 2023 within the first case. Jurors awarded Carroll $18.3 million in compensatory damages for defamation and $65 million in punitive damages.
Jurors within the first case discovered that Trump had sexually abused Carroll however didn’t rape her. Carroll was awarded $5 million in damages within the prior case partly for the sexual assault beneath a legislation giving survivors a one-year window to sue for time-barred claims and partly for defamation stemming from a denial by Trump in October 2022.
Habba nonetheless plans to attraction each verdicts. Habba mentioned in her first letter to Kaplan his “overtly hostile” therapy of Trump and his “preferential therapy” of Carroll’s attorneys can be a problem in her attraction.
One other subject within the second case could possibly be whether or not the punitive damages are extreme beneath the due course of clause.
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