Alina Habba pulls back after accusing Carroll’s lawyer of impropriety

Alina Habba, the lawyer representing former President Donald Trump in the E. Jean Carroll defamation cases, retreated on Tuesday from her concerns about a potential conflict of interest after a threat of sanctions from Carroll’s lead attorney.

Advice columnist Carroll has won two civil defamation cases against Trump after he denied on multiple occasions that he sexually assaulted her in the mid-1990s, as Carroll has claimed. Last week, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83 million in damages for his public denial of Carroll’s allegation in 2019.

On Monday, Habba sent a letter to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan raising questions about an alleged conflict of interest between him and Carroll’s lead attorney, Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge. She cited a New York Post report featuring an anonymous source who had claimed that the judge served as the lawyer’s mentor when they briefly overlapped at the same white-shoe law firm in the early 1990s.

Roberta Kaplan sent a brief letter in response to Habba’s concerns on Tuesday, saying the allegation was “baseless” and that she had no recollection of interacting with Lewis Kaplan at the firm before he was nominated to become a federal judge by then-President Bill Clinton in 1994.

Carroll’s lawyer also threatened sanctions in response to Habba’s Monday evening letter.

Habba responded to Kaplan Tuesday afternoon, saying that she was only “seeking to inquire” about the potential connection between the judge and the lawyer and that her earlier letter contained no allegations. The Trump lawyer said toward the end of her letter that the matter had “seemingly been resolved.”