NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s lawyer on Friday renewed a mistrial in a New York defamation case against the former president, saying an advice columnist who accused him of sexually assaulting her in the 1990s ruined her civil case by sharing emails removing strangers who threatened her with death.
Attorney Alina Habba told a judge in a letter that writer E. Jean Carroll’s trial was ruined when Habba’s questions elicited from Carroll that Carroll had deleted an unknown number of social media posts containing death threats.
She said Carroll “failed to take reasonable steps to preserve relevant evidence.” In fact, she did much worse: she actively deleted evidence that she now seeks to rely on in determining her damages.”
When Habba first filed the annulment request with Trump sitting next to her as Carroll testified Wednesday, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan denied it without comment.
In her letter, Habba said the deletions were significant because Carroll’s lawyers had made the death threats, which they blamed on Trump’s statements about Carroll, a key reason why they say the jury should award Carroll $10 million in compensatory damages and millions more in damages. .
The jury will only decide what, if any, damages Carroll should be awarded after a jury found last year that Trump sexually assaulted her in the spring of 1996 in the locker room of a Bergdorf Goodman store and defamed her with statements he made in October 2022 done. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages.
The current lawsuit, aimed solely at damages, covers only two statements Trump made in June 2019 while he was president after learning about Carroll’s claims in a magazine article that included excerpts from Carroll’s memoir, which made her first public claims about Trump contain.
Habba noted in her letter that the 80-year-old Carroll testified that she became so scared when she read one of the first death threats against her that she dived because she feared she was about to be shot.
Robbie Kaplan, an attorney for Carroll who is not related to the judge, declined comment.
Also on Friday, both sides submitted written arguments at the judge’s request on whether Trump’s lawyers can argue to the jury that Carroll had a duty to limit the harm caused by Trump’s public statements.
Habba asked the judge to instruct the jury that Carroll had a duty to minimize the effects of the defamation she had suffered.
However, Robbie Kaplan said that Habba should be stopped from making such an argument to the jury, as she did in her opening statement, and that the jury should be instructed that what Habba told them was incorrect.
“It would be particularly shocking to say that survivors of sexual abuse should remain silent even when their abuser publicly discredits them,” she wrote.
The trial will resume Monday, when Trump will have the opportunity to testify after Carroll’s lawyers finish presenting their case.