Another Day, Another Desperate Trump Plea To Delay E. Jean Carroll Defamation Suit
Keep trying, the court seems to be warming to these garbage motions.
Yesterday, Donald Trump’s lawyers filed a motion to reopen discovery and postpone the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial in light of the “recent, belated disclosure of material information by the plaintiff, E. Jean Carroll (“Plaintiff”), which raises significant concerns as to Plaintiff’s bias and motive in commencing the instant lawsuit.”
The document alleged misconduct by Carroll’s lawyers, who supposedly allowed her to lie in deposition, obscuring the fact that LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor, was subsidizing her litigation.
They quote from an October 2020 deposition:
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Q: Are you presently paying your counsel’s fees?
CARROLL: This is a contingency case.
Q: So you’re not paying expenses or anything out of pocket to date; is that correct?
CARROLL: I’m not sure about expenses. I have to look that up.
Q. Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?
CARROLL: No.
On April 10, Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan, of Kaplan Hecker & Fink, wrote to Trump’s counsel Chad Seigel:
During the course of preparing for her testimony at trial, Ms. Carroll has recollected additional information. While Ms. Carroll stands by that testimony about this case being a contingency case, she now recalls that at some point her counsel secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to offset certain expenses and legal fees.
And Trump’s lawyers were off to the races!
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“Plaintiff apparently perjured herself during her deposition,” they huffed indignantly. “Her counsel sat by and allowed her to do so, knowing full well that her testimony was false; and then they conspired to conceal the truth for nearly six months, only to disclose it on the eve of trial.”
Turns out, the truth is a lot more complicated than that. As Carroll’s team pointed out in a response letter to the court, her testimony was technically correct: the case is a contingency case, and Hoffman’s non-profit is not paying her legal fees. Carroll, who is almost 80, admitted that she was unclear about funding for the expenses, which was secured ten months after the commencement of the original action and thus cannot have been the impetus for filing the defamation suit — much less making her original accusations in 2019.
Carroll further argues that Trump waived the issue years ago. In a September 2020 response to an interrogatory about litigation funding, Carroll’s attorneys objected, but stipulated that they would answer only “on the condition that Trump agrees to provide information about who/what entity is paying his attorneys’ fees in this action.” Apparently unwilling to disclose the details of his own litigation funding, which appears to be subsidized entirely with dark money from his PACs, Trump let the matter drop. It was only in preparation for the trial, when Carroll apparently remembered details about the expenses, that her lawyers disclosed it sua sponte.
Trump’s incendiary ploy appears to have worked with the media. For instance, CNN quoted extensively from Trump’s letter, while devoting just two sentences to Carroll’s response. But it made less headway with Judge Lewis Kaplan, who granted a one-hour deposition and some minor document disclosures, but not the postponement which appears to have been Trump’s overriding objective:
The question whether and when plaintiff or her counsel have obtained financial support in this action has nothing directly to do with the ultimate merits of the case. Although I do not now decide the question, it perhaps might prove relevant to the question of plaintiffs credibility, in view of the deposition testimony referred to above. Accordingly, I will permit a brief and carefully circumscribed examination of that narrow question without prejudging the question of whether and to what extent examination on this matter may be permitted at trial. Accordingly, defendant’s application is granted, but only to the extent that (I) plaintiff shall furnish the defendant, no later than April 16, 2023, with documents sufficient to establish that the inception of the financing assistance for the Carroll litigation in fact occurred in or after mid-2020, (b) any documents concerning the state of plaintiffs knowledge, if any, of the financing assistance as of the date of her deposition and as of the present, and (2) defendant may conduct an additional deposition of Ms. Carroll not to exceed 60 minutes in duration, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, which shall be (1) limited to the subject of Ms. Carroll’s knowledge of the financing assistance as of the date of her deposition and as of the present, and (2)completed no later than April 19, 2023. The motion is denied in all other respects save that the Court reserves for determination at trial the matter of any requested adverse inference instruction. Trial shall begin as scheduled on April 25, 2023 unless otherwise ordered.
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Trump’s motion to delay the case due to negative publicity — supposedly ginned up by the Manhattan DA, not by Trump himself in his incessant public speeches — is still pending. But it does not appear that the court is inclined to reverse its February vow this trial would start on the 25th, “come hell or high water.”
Meanwhile, Trump has filed his proposed jury instructions. Those appear to consist largely of a plea for the court to reverse itself and allow his legal team to get the names of prospective jurors. The former president, who unleashed his mob on the jury foreperson in the Roger Stone case and recently warned of “death and destruction” should he be indicted, directing his supporters to protest at the New York courthouse, seems unlikely to get the requested relief.
But the night is young, and Team Trump has undoubtedly ten batshit crazy motions to fire off before the jury is even empaneled.
Carroll v. Trump I [Docket via Court Listener]
Carroll v. Trump II [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.
