Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
Alina Habba, one of Donald Trump’s attorneys, quickly backed off a recent claim that the judge who presided over E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against the former president had an “insane” and “incestuous” conflict of interest—because he briefly worked at the same major law firm as one of Carroll’s lawyers.
The connection was first raised in an article by the New York Post which quoted an anonymous former partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, who said that Judge Lewis Kaplan—then a senior litigation partner—had been “like a mentor” to Carroll attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation)—who joined the firm as a junior litigation associate. The pair overlapped for just two years, from 1992-1994, according to the tabloid.
The claims came just one day after a jury awarded Carroll an $83.3 million judgment from Trump—his second courtroom loss to the writer in recent months.