E. Jean Carroll's lawyer threatens sanctions against Alina Habba after Trump lawyer pushes false conflict-of-interest story

• Trump and Carroll are fighting over his attorney's claim that the judge was once her lawyer's mentor.
• Carroll's lawyer says she has no memory of the judge from their brief overlap at a big law firm 30 years ago.

E. Jean Carroll's lawyer is fighting back against former President Donald Trump's claim that the judge in their defamation trials had been her mentor 30 years ago — writing in a court filing Tuesday that she had zero memory of interacting with the judge during their brief time working at the same large, national law firm.

"The length of our overlap at Paul, Weiss was less than two years," from the end of 1992 until mid-1994, Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan wrote in a response filed Tuesday morning, adding: "During that relatively brief period more than thirty years ago, I do remember the Paul, Weiss partners with whom I worked and none of them are Your Honor."

Alina Habba raised the claim in a Monday court filing, saying Roberta Kaplan and US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw both of Carroll's lawsuits against Trump, had a close professional relationship at the law firm in the early 1990s.

She asked the judge to "provide defense counsel with all of the relevant facts" for a motion to vacate last week's jury verdict awarding Carroll $83.3 million for Trump defaming her. Habba has also said she intends to appeal the verdict.

"The underlying defamation case tried last year, and the damages trial completed last week, were both litigations in which there were many clashes between Your Honor and defense counsel," Habba wrote. "We believe, and will argue on appeal, that the Court was overtly hostile towards defense counsel and President Trump, and displayed preferential treatment towards Plaintiff's counsel."

The rumor that the two Kaplans (who are not related to each other) had a mentor-mentee relationship came from a New York Post article by the columnist Charles Gasparino that quoted an anonymous source described as a former Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison partner. The quote said: "Lew was like her mentor." Habba herself also complained about the decades-old professional overlap between the judge and Carroll's lawyer, calling it "insane and so incestuous."

Roberta Kaplan wrote in her Tuesday letter that she had no memory of ever interacting with the judge while he was at Paul, Weiss.

"I remember no direct interaction from that time period with Your Honor at all," she wrote. "This is hardly surprising since at that time, I was a very junior associate at a large New York law firm and Your Honor was one of the leaders of the Paul, Weiss litigation department."

About two hours after the letter from Carroll's attorney, Habba said she was just asking questions.

"The purpose of the letter was simply to inquire as to whether there is any merit to a recently published New York Post story which reported on the alleged existence of such a relationship," she wrote.

In her own letter earlier, Roberta Kaplan wrote that Trump and his attorney "have pushed a false narrative of judicial bias so that they could characterize any jury verdict against Trump as the product of a corrupt system," and quoted one of the judge's previous rulings to point out that such complaints had no effect in a courtroom.

She also wrote that she may seek sanctions against Habba for the false accusation.

"While Ms. Habba ends her letter by characterizing this as a 'troubling matter,' what is actually troubling is both the substance and timing of her false accusations of impropriety by on the part of E. Jean Carroll's counsel or the Court," she wrote. "Accordingly, while we wanted to submit our response to Ms. Habba's letter as soon as possible, we reserve all rights, including but not limited to the right to seek sanctions."

Habba is already a member of a long list of Trump lawyers to be sanctioned for pushing false claims in a courtroom. Last year, a federal judge in Florida sanctioned her for filing a conspiracy-theory-filled lawsuit that falsely claimed the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton rigged that year's election, which Trump won.