The lead attorney for writer E. Jean Carroll, Roberta Kaplan, has threatened to pursue sanctions against Trump lawyer Alina Habba over claims she pushed alleging the federal judge overseeing their clients' defamation trial failed to disclose a conflict of interest.
In a Monday letter challenging the $83.3 million verdict in the case, Habba referenced a Saturday New York Post article that quoted an anonymous former partner at Paul Weiss, the law firm Kaplan and U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan both previously worked for, claiming that the judge was Roberta Kaplan's "mentor."
"As Ms. Habba well knows, these allegations are utterly baseless," Roberta Kaplan fired back in a three-page letter Tuesday.
Her time working for the firm briefly intersected with U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan's tenure at the company for under two years in the early 1990s, according to The Messenger, and she and the judge are not related.
The Carroll lawyer further questioned the origin of the Post's claim.
"In that regard, it is telling that the article in the New York Post only appeared after Ms. Habba’s own statement to the media last weekend where she claimed that only after trial concluded did she learn that Your Honor and I both previously worked at Paul, Weiss, referring to a 'conflict of interest' that is 'insane and so incestuous,'" Roberta Kaplan added.
Roberta Kaplan countered that the unnamed partner cited in the Post's article "(if he even exists) clearly has a very flawed memory about events that occurred three decades ago." She said she never worked for the now-judge while at the firm and did not recall any direct interactions with him.
Their overlapping tenures was also a known "matter of public record," the attorney added, accusing Habba of trying to push a "false narrative" to paint the jury verdict as "the product of a corrupt system."
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