Alina Habba left dangling on the hook for fraud after latest Trump lawsuit settlement

Alina Habba was deliberately excluded from a lawsuit settlement involving Donald Trump and his Bedminster golf club by a former employee who claims the attorney tricked her into silence over sexual harassment claims.

The former president's golf club agreed to pay $82,500 to former waitress Alice Bianco, whose attorney made sure to include a line in the settlement specifically leaving Habba open to a separate lawsuit by the plaintiff, reported The Daily Beast.

"The parties agree that Alina Habba is not a party to this release," the settlement states.

The former president's lawyer was cut out of the deal because Bianco feels betrayed by Habba, who the suit alleges posed as a concerned friend offering legal advice on her claims of sexual harassment by a supervisor, but then "fraudulently" persuaded her to agree to an "illegal" hush money payment.

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The two-week sprint to push her into the agreement gave Habba leverage to set up the deal, which she believed would impress the former president and usher her into his inner circle, the former employee claims.

And that's exactly what happened.

Within a month of arranging the August 2021 hush-money deal, Habba became Trump's top lawyer in a sexual assault defamation case brought by former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos, although that was later dropped, and she has represented the former president in other matters, most famously the New York civil fraud case he lost earlier this year and was penalized $454 million.

Bianco signed the four-page settlement March 4 that lets her keep the $15,000 hush money payment she received for keeping quiet about her supervisor's actions, and her attorney got $82,500 for litigating the case, but Habba now faces consequential threats to her professional credentials and bank accounts for setting up the non-disclosure agreement that has now been voided.

“We got everything we asked for," said Bianco's attorney Nancy Erika Smith. "We asked to void the agreement, that she not pay back. I didn’t want her to pay me a dime. So we got that, and she still has the right to sue Alina Habba for fraud, and she has the right to sue the club for sexual harassment."