Trump Lawyers Bumble As Second Carroll Case Looms
Discovery deadlines? How about discovery suggestions?
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Another day, another “WTF” moment courtesy of Donald Trump’s illustrious legal team. Today’s jaw drop comes in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, where the defendant has moved to “substitute a new rebuttal expert in this matter.” By which he means, “add a rebuttal witness since the court bounced our guy” a mere two months before the trial.
Judge Lewis Kaplan has now rejected Trump’s proposed expert witness Robert Fisher twice. In March, the court blocked him from testifying in Carroll II, and on October 5, he made the same determination with respect to Carroll I. Perhaps a different set of lawyers might have taken the March ruling as a sign that they should find a new expert toot sweet. But Alina Habba and her partner Michael Madaio persisted!
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To recap: In 2019, advice columnist E. Jean Carroll accused then-President Trump of sexually assaulting her in the mid-90s. He responded by accusing her of lying in service of a Democratic plot to get him. She sued in New York state court for defamation, and he removed the case to federal court under the Westfall Act. That case, known as Carroll I, spent close to two years being batted around the Second Circuit and the DC Court of Appeals to determine whether Trump had been acting within the scope of his official duties when he said Carroll was too ugly and old to sexually assault. It is now set for trial on January 15, 2024.
But in the meantime, Trump repeated the same statement after leaving the White House, handing the plaintiff even more evidence that he hadn’t been doing official president stuff when he said it the first time. That repetition, specifically a particularly nasty attack on Carroll in October of 2022, formed the basis of the second lawsuit. On Thanksgiving of 2022, Carroll filed Carroll II, alleging defamation and sexual abuse under the New York Adult Survivors Act, a law which granted a one-year amnesty for claims which would otherwise have been time-barred.
That case resulted in a $5 million jury verdict in May of this year. But before that happened, Judge Kaplan rejected Fisher as a rebuttal witness to counter Carroll’s expert, Dr. Ashlee Humphreys. Prof. Humphreys produced two reports, of more than 100 pages each, calculating the damages in each case. Fisher produced two responses, of less than 20 pages each, in which he opined that Carroll had actually “benefitted from this public dispute in terms of increased positive exposure for her as a professional and positive enhancement of her personal character and reputation.”
In depositions, Fisher admitted that he had not read read most of Dr. Humphreys’s reports, and had relied largely on Google searches and “four or five” articles about the case. Eschewing traditional methodologies in favor of his own “educated feel,” Fisher admitted that he was “a little skeptical about, you know, academia people and their theories on how you should do things” and said “I don’t particularly get into data.”
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On top of which, he gabbled that he started his journalism career in the late 60s by plagiarizing posts from the LA Times.
But Fisher wasn’t through stepping on rakes, as described in Carroll’s motion to exclude his testimony:
In addition to inaccuracies, Fisher’s report also contained plagiarized material. After criticizing Professor Humphreys’ definition of “reputation,” Fisher supplied a supposedly distinct definition that he claimed he wrote specifically for purposes of his 2022 report. Fisher Dep. at 220:4–224:6. But he had no explanation when confronted with the fact that the definition appears verbatim in an article from 2018 that Fisher did not author. Id. at 225:12– 229:7 (“Q. Can you read the first three sentences of the article. A. … Boy that sounds familiar. … I’m looking like I’m a plagiarist or something. … [M]y compliments to whoever found this though.”).
WHY WOULD THE DEFENDANT EVER THINK TO GO LOOKING FOR AN ALTERNATE WITNESS AFTER A PERFORMANCE LIKE THAT?
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On October 5, Judge Kaplan barred Fisher from testifying in Carroll I, just as he’d done eight months earlier in Carroll II. Only then did it occur to Trump’s lawyers to start a new “to do” list. Item 1: Persuade court to allow new rebuttal witness. Item 2: Find new rebuttal witness.
On November 2, just ten weeks before the trial, Madaio filed an oddly worded letter motion which appeared to ask the judge to either reverse himself with respect to Fisher, or allow the defendant to sub in a rebuttal witness to be named later. His theory seems to be that it would be superduper “prejudicial” for Trump to have to go to trial without anyone to attack Carroll’s expert, so he should be able to ignore all discovery deadlines and stick someone in there ten minutes before the jury is empaneled.
Unsurprisingly, Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley does not agree with this assessment:
Trump’s use of the word “substitute” here is misplaced. There is no expert left to “substitute”—the Court excluded Mr. Fisher’s testimony in its entirety. Trump is essentially asking the Court to allow him to reopen discovery and disclose an entirely new expert, two months before trial and nearly a year after expert discovery closed. While parties may file a motion to disclose a new expert witness after the close of discovery, the motion should be made under Rule 16(b)(4) as a motion to modify the scheduling order.
TL, DR? Fail to plan, plan to fail. And they always do!
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.
