Former President Donald Trump’s legal team plans to appeal the $83.3 million decision in the defamation lawsuit from E. Jean Carroll due to an alleged “insane” conflict of interest with the presiding judge.
As Breitbart News reported Friday, a jury awarded “an additional $83.3 million to former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who says former President Donald Trump damaged her reputation by calling her a liar after she accused him of sexual assault.”
In this courtroom sketch, E. Jean Carroll, right, turns around towards former President Donald Trump, seated left, on January 16, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Elizabeth Williams)
“The verdict was delivered Friday by a seven-man, two-woman jury in a trial regularly attended by Trump, who abruptly left the courtroom during closing arguments by Carroll’s lawyer, only to later return,” the report added.
Over the weekend, Donald Trump’s legal team said they will appeal the ruling, with attorney Alina Habba claiming they were unaware of the fact Judge Lewis Kaplan had previously mentored E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, in the 1990s. Despite similar last names, the two have no relation.
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“It was never disclosed. It’s insane and so incestuous,” Habba said, alleging that the past relationship had never been disclosed.
Lawyer Alina Habba speaks to the media outside the New York Supreme Court, on November 2, 2023, in New York. (Stefan Jeremiah/AP)
According to the Daily Mail, the conflict-of-interest allegations erupted from an “anonymous former Weiss partner, who reportedly claimed Roberta Kaplan — a junior associate — made an extra effort to stand out to the managing partners.”
Former President Donald Trump and Alina Habba, attorney for former President Donald Trump, right, during a trial at New York State Supreme Court in New York, on October 17, 2023. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The former partner claimed the judge served as Roberta Kaplan’s mentor.
“Before becoming a founding partner at law firm Kaplan, Keckler & Fink in 2016, Roberta Kaplan worked alongside the judge at Paul, Weiss Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison in Manhattan,” noted the Mail.
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“She began at the firm in 1992, according to her LinkedIn, where Judge Kaplan was a partner until he was appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton in 1994,” it added.
Zak Sawyer, a representative for Roberta Kaplan, claimed that she and the judge barely knew each other.
“They overlapped for less than two years in the early 1990s at a large law firm when he was a senior partner and she was a junior associate and she never worked for him,” he said.
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