A federal judge on Thursday said he’ll allow lawyers for Donald Trump to query his rape accuser, the author E. Jean Carroll, under oath in regards to the funding of her lawsuit provided by LinkedIn co-founder and major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.
But Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected a related request by Trump’s legal team to delay by one month the beginning of his civil trial on April 25 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Carroll’s lawsuit claims Trump raped her within the mid-Nineties within the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store after a probability encounter, and that he defamed her in the best way he denied her allegations when she went public with them when he was president.
Kaplan’s rulings got here hours after Trump’s lawyers in a court filing accused Carroll’s attorneys of deliberately failing for months to reveal that Hoffman had funded her case against the previous president. Carroll had testified in an October deposition that nobody else was paying her legal fees and that she was unclear about who was covering case expenses.
“The query whether and when plaintiff [Carroll] or her counsel have obtained financial support on this motion has nothing on to do with the last word merits of the case,” Kaplan wrote in his order.
But, he added, “Although I don’t now resolve the query, it’d perhaps prove relevant to the query of the plaintiff’s credibility, in view of the deposition testimony.”
The judge said he would allow “a temporary and punctiliously circumscribed examination of that narrow query” of Carroll’s knowledge of Hoffman’s assistance. Kaplan said he would later determine whether the problem may very well be raised on the upcoming trial.
Kaplan said Trump’s lawyers could depose Carroll by next Wednesday for not than 60 minutes unless the judge agrees to increase it.
Trump’s lawyers Joseph Tacopina and Alina Habba of their letter earlier to Kaplan on Thursday said that on Monday they received a letter from Carroll’s team stating that their client “now recalls that sooner or later her counsel secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to offset certain expenses and legal fees.”
Trump’s lawyers said that on Wednesday, Carroll’s attorneys disclosed that Hoffman was the “primary backer” of that nonprofit group, American Future Republic.
The billionaire Hoffman has spent thousands and thousands of dollars backing Democrats in congressional races and reportedly funding efforts to oppose Trump in elections — including the 2024 presidential race by which he’s currently leading the GOP primary field.
Dmitri Mehlhorn, one among Hoffman’s philanthropic advisors, told CNBC that since 2017 they’ve provided third-party funding to legal efforts that aim to “protect our residents from violent threats.”
In those instances, “we now have not met the plaintiffs, we don’t resolve who the organization chooses to support and the clients generally have no idea our identity,” Mehlhorn said in an emailed statement.
In Carroll’s case, “our particular grant was made before Ms. Carroll filed suit and we had no prior knowledge that our funding would go to support her specifically,” he said.
It was unclear how much money was provided for Carroll’s litigation.
In her deposition, Carroll noted that her suit was a contingency case, meaning her attorneys only receives a commission if she wins the case.
But Tacopina and Habba wrote that the revelation “raises significant concerns as to Plaintiff’s bias and motive” in filing the suit.
Their letter asked Kaplan to partially reopen the evidence-sharing stage of the case, often known as the invention period.
Along with requesting a month delay in the beginning of the trial, in addition they Kaplan to instruct the jury to notice Carroll’s “willful defiance of her discovery obligations.” Kaplan in his ruling later Thursday said he would rule on that instruction request throughout the trial.
“The proposition that Plaintiff has suddenly ‘recollected’ the source of her funding for this high-profile litigation — which has spanned 4 years, spawned two separate actions, and been before quite a few state, federal, and appellate courts — will not be only preposterous, it’s demonstrably false,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
In a separate letter to the judge Thursday, Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan slammed the efforts to disrupt the trial as “baseless.”
Carroll last week “recollected additional information” related to the exchange from her deposition while preparing for the trial, her lawyer wrote.
Kaplan said she “promptly disclosed to Trump’s counsel that, while Carroll stands by her testimony about this being a contingency fee case, she now recalls that her counsel sooner or later secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to cover certain expenses and charges.”
That funding got here in September 2020, nearly a yr after Carroll filed a criticism against Trump in state court, her lawyer noted.
The plaintiff’s lawyers told Trump’s team this week that Carroll “has never met and has never been party to any communications (written or oral) with anyone related to the nonprofit.” In addition they proposed a compromise to permit Carroll to be cross-examined in regards to the funding.
“But apparently, that was not enough,” Carroll’s lawyer said.
Carroll’s team also challenged Trump’s lawyers’ requests for last-minute changes to the trial schedule.
“It’s, in fact, facially absurd for Trump to insist that Reid Hoffman, who has never met or communicated with Carroll, possesses evidence bearing on the reality or falsity of Carroll’s battery and defamation claims,” they wrote.
