E. Jean Carroll's lead attorney on Tuesday threatened to seek sanctions against her Donald Trump lawyer counterpart Alina Habba over her "utterly baseless" claim that a federal judge may have had an undisclosed conflict of interest.
In the early 1990s, senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan and Carroll's lead attorney Roberta Kaplan briefly overlapped in their tenures at the law firm Paul Weiss. Though the judge and the attorney share a surname, they are not related.
For fewer than two years before the former became a federal judge, the pair worked together at a firm that now has nearly 1,000 attorneys. The New York Post on Saturday anonymously quoted a former partner there claiming the judge was her "mentor."
But Kaplan in Tuesday's three-page letter said she can't remember any direct interactions with the then-future judge and never worked for him.
"As Ms. Habba well knows, these allegations are utterly baseless," Roberta Kaplan's letter states.
In a letter on Monday, Habba relied entirely on the single-anonymous source tabloid rumor, but Carroll's lawyer questioned how the Post came to publish that story.
"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,'" the letter notes.
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Though the Post attributed the claim of a "mentor-mentee relationship" to an “unnamed partner at Paul Weiss,” Carroll's lawyer said "that partner (if he even exists) clearly has a very flawed memory about events that occurred three decades ago."
Habba indicated that the supposed conflict-of-interest could figure into her efforts to topple the two judgments against Trump: the original $5 million sexual abuse and defamation verdict and the $83.3 million defamation award that followed.
Carroll's lawyer noted that the less-than-two-year overlap between the Kaplans' tenures at Paul Weiss three decades ago was a well-known "matter of public record," and she said Habba is only now invoking it to push a "false narrative."
"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," the letter states. "While that strategy has now moved into its post-verdict phase, it is now time for Defendant’s false and vexatious claims of bias or impropriety to stop."
If Carroll's lawyers bring a sanctions motion, Judge Kaplan will have to decide what, if any, penalties to impose. Habba previously complained about the "overtly hostile" judge, who threatened during trial to put her "in the lockup" for questioning his orders long after they had been issued.
Shortly after Carroll's lawyer filed the letter, Habba insisted she never accused the judge of a conflict of interest — and that she simply wanted to "inquire" about the Post's reporting, which she insisted she played no role in beyond responding.
"I played no part in uncovering this information; have never communicated with the unnamed Paul Weiss partner; and have no personal knowledge as to whether the information contained in the article is true or false," she wrote in a letter filed roughly two hours after the sanctions-motion threat.
In light of the denial by Carroll's lawyer, Habba said, "this issue has seemingly been resolved."
After that remark, Habba reiterated her bias claims against the judge in a footnote. She intially asked for a "fact-specific inquiry" into the Kaplans' prior professional relationship at Paul Weiss, a request she appeared to fold roughly two hours after the the threat by Carroll's lawyer. The juries in both Carroll v. Trump trials reached unanimous verdicts against the former president within roughly three hours.