Judge Lewis Kaplan has rejected Donald Trump’s motion for mistrial in E. Jean Carroll ‘s defamation lawsuit against him.
Trump’s legal team pushed for a mistrial on the basis that Carroll admitted to deleting email evidence, even though she was under a subpoena.
However, Judge Kaplan claimed that this fact did not warrant a mistrial because Carroll’s duty to preserve the messages did not kick in until she decided to sue Trump a month later after meeting with her lawyer.
The Clinton-appointed federal judge also argued that Trump never attempted to recover any of Carroll’s deleted messages.
Here are some more details on the judge’s decision, from NBC News:
Trump’s attorneys had argued in their mistrial motion that Carroll deleted threatening messages, including death threats, which they said was cause for a mistrial.
In a 30-page decision Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said that while Carroll admitted she deleted someof the purported death threats, the details of the deletions remain unclear. He ruled that Trump’s team failed to demonstrate that any of the missing messages would have aided his defense, which would have been necessary to show that her deletions were prejudicial.
Attorneys for Trump and Carroll did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Kaplan said that Trump’s attorneys knew as far back as January 2023 that Carroll had deleted some emails, and she repeated that testimony at her first trial last year. The judge pointed out that Trump’s team never followed up on those admissions by bringing them to the court’s attention or by seeking to recover those messages.
“Mr. Trump has offered no evidence that he ever even attempted to recover any of these messages through discovery or otherwise,” Kaplan said. “In fact, he does not even argue that the messages in question have been permanently lost and are now unrecoverable. This failure alone was sufficient basis to deny the alternative relief he sought.”
CNN also reported:
A federal judge denied Donald Trump’s motions for a mistrial in the defamation case brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll saying the former president’s arguments had no “merit” and are “entirely pointless.”
Judge Lewis Kaplan denied Trump’s motions from the bench during the civil trial and said a written order would follow. In the written order on Wednesday, the judge said granting a request for a mistrial “would have been entirely pointless” because it would only mean that the case would start over.
