Alina Habba backs down from claims that E. Jean Carroll judge had conflict of interest

Former President Donald Trump's attorney Alina Habba is backing off from an accusation that Lewis Kaplan, the judge who presided over the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, has a conflict of interest with the defense, reported NBC News.

"Habba on Monday filed a letter with the court citing a New York Post story that said U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan and Carroll attorney Roberta Kaplan, who are not related, had worked at the major law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in the 1990s," said the report. "An unidentified former partner at the firm, which employs around 1,000 lawyers, told the Post that Lewis Kaplan had been 'like her mentor.'" Habba accused Kaplan of violating judicial conduct rules, saying, "that fact should have been disclosed before any case involving these parties was permitted to proceed forward" if true, and threatened to push for a new trial.

However, Habba followed up on Tuesday with another letter that struck a very different tone. "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 said. "Since Ms. Kaplan has now denied that there was ever a mentor-mentee relationship between herself and Your Honor, this issue has seemingly been resolved."

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This comes after Carroll's attorney fired back at the allegation as meritless, saying, "The length of our overlap [at the firm] was less than two years," and questioning whether the "unidentified former partner" who spoke to the Post even exists.

Habba's antics had her constantly clashing with Kaplan during the trial, where she tried to argue against the already-adjudicated facts of a previous trial that established Trump was liable for sexual abuse and defamation; Kaplan was forced to remind her the sole purpose of this trial was to assess damages, not revisit settled findings.

Ultimately, the trial ended with the jury awarding Carroll $83.3 million in damages from Trump.