Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked for a mistrial to be declared in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuit
Former President Donald Trump’s legal team has asked the judge in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against the former president to declare a mistrial, arguing that Ms. Carroll failed to preserve key evidence by deleting emails that purportedly included death threats.
Trump attorney Alina Habba made the request to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in a letter dated Jan. 19, in which she asked him to toss the case because the trial was ruined when Ms. Carroll admitted in court testimony that she had deleted an unknown number of emails and social media messages containing death threats.
Ms. Habba said Ms. Carroll “failed to take reasonable steps to preserve relevant evidence. In fact, she did much worse—she actively deleted evidence which she now attempts to rely on in establishing her damages claim.”
Ms. Carroll’s lawyers have made the purported death threats an important reason why their client is asking the jury to award her $10 million in compensatory damages and millions more in punitive damages. They blame the death threats on President Trump’s public remarks about Ms. Carroll.
“Plaintiff recounted to the jury that she received vicious death threats on June 21, 2019, which she directly attributed to President Trump’s June 21, 2019 statement,” Ms. Habba wrote in the letter. “And she sought to substantiate her claim for emotional harm by describing how she felt like an attack would happen ‘right now’ and that her heart would race.”
“However, it cannot be established that these messages existed at all, since Plaintiff deleted them,” she added.
In her letter, Ms. Habba said the deletions are significant because the missing evidence plays a key role in Ms. Carroll’s demands.
Ms. Habba then asked the judge to declare a mistrial to preclude Ms. Carroll from seeking damages related to purported death threats or to include an adverse inference charge against Ms. Carroll, which is basically an instruction to the jury to weigh the missing evidence against her.
Ms. Carroll’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the mistrial request.
By Tom Ozimek
