Global Courant 2023-04-14 06:29:14
A federal judge said Thursday he will allow Donald Trump’s lawyers to question his rape accuser, author E. Jean Carroll, under oath about the funding of her lawsuit raised by LinkedIn cofounder and major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.
But Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected a related request from Trump’s legal team to delay the start of his April 25 civil trial in Manhattan’s U.S. District Court by a month.
Carroll’s lawsuit alleges Trump raped her in the mid-1990s in the locker room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store after a chance meeting, and that he defamed her in the way he denied her allegations when she went out with them when he was president .
Kaplan’s statements came hours after Trump’s lawyers in a lawsuit accused Carroll’s lawyers of deliberately failing to disclose for months that Hoffman had funded her case against the former president. Carroll had testified in an October statement that no one else paid her legal fees and that it was unclear to her who was covering the costs of the lawsuit.
“The question of whether and when Plaintiff (Carroll) or her counsel received financial assistance in this action has nothing directly to do with the ultimate merits of the case,” Kaplan wrote in his order.
But, he added, “While I’m not making a decision on the question now, it might prove relevant to the question of the plaintiff’s credibility, in view of the testimony of the affidavit.”
The judge said he would allow “a brief and carefully defined examination of that narrow question” of Carroll’s knowledge of Hoffman’s aid. Kaplan said he would determine later whether to raise the issue at the upcoming trial.
Kaplan said Trump’s lawyers could debar Carroll for no more than 60 minutes next Wednesday unless the judge agrees to extend it.
Trump attorneys, Joseph Tacopina and Alina Habba, said in their letter to Kaplan earlier on Thursday that they received a letter Monday from Carroll’s team saying their client “now remembers that her counsel may have requested additional funding from obtained by a non-profit organization to offset certain expenses”. and legal fees.”
Trump’s attorneys said Carroll’s attorneys disclosed Wednesday that Hoffman was the “primary lender” of that nonprofit, American Future Republic.
The billionaire Hoffman has spent millions of dollars supporting Democrats in congressional races and Reportedly funding efforts to oppose Trump in elections — including the 2024 presidential race in which he currently leads the GOP primary field.
Dmitri Mehlhorn, one of Hoffman’s philanthropic advisers, told CNBC that since 2017 they have provided third-party funding to legal efforts that aim to “protect our citizens from violent threats.”
In those cases, “we haven’t met the plaintiffs, we don’t decide who the organization supports, and the customers generally don’t know our identity,” Mehlhorn said in an emailed statement.
In Carroll’s case, “our specific grant was made before Ms. Carroll sued and we didn’t know that our funding would go specifically to her,” he said.
It was unclear how much money had been earmarked for Carroll’s lawsuit.
In her statement, Carroll noted that her lawsuit was a contingency, meaning her lawyers will only be paid if she wins the case.
But Tacopina and Habba wrote that the disclosure raises “significant concerns about plaintiff’s bias and motive” in filing the lawsuit.
Their letter asked Kaplan to partially reopen the evidence-sharing phase in the case, known as the discovery period.
In addition to requesting a one-month delay in the start of the trial, they also asked Kaplan to instruct the jury to note Carroll’s “deliberate defiance of her discovery obligations.” Kaplan said in his ruling later on Thursday that he would decide on that request for instruction at trial.
“The claim that Plaintiff has suddenly ‘remembered’ the source of her funding for this high-profile lawsuit — which has lasted four years, spawned two separate suits, and been before numerous state, federal, and appellate courts — is not only preposterous, it is demonstrably false,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
In a separate letter Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan called the attempts to disrupt the process “unfounded” on Thursday.
Carroll recalled “additional information” last week regarding the exchange of her statement as she prepared for trial, her attorney wrote.
Kaplan said she “immediately communicated to Trump’s counsel that while Carroll stands by her testimony that this is a case of contingency, she now recalls that her counsel obtained additional funding from a nonprofit at some point to cover certain expenses and fees.”
That funding came in September 2020, nearly a year after Carroll filed a complaint against Trump in state court, her attorney noted.
Plaintiff’s attorneys told Trump’s team this week that Carroll “never met and was never a party to any communication (whether written or oral) with anyone associated with the nonprofit.” They also proposed a compromise to allow Carroll to cross-examine the funding.
“But apparently that wasn’t enough,” said Carroll’s attorney.
Carroll’s team also disputed Trump’s lawyers’ requests for last-minute changes to the trial schedule.
“It is, of course, on the face of it absurd for Trump to insist that Reid Hoffman, who never met or communicated with Carroll, possesses evidence regarding the truth or falsity of Carroll’s accusations of battery and defamation,” they wrote.
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