Judge Lewis Kaplan has denied former President Donald Trump's motion to declare a mistrial and place sanctions in the E. Jean Carroll case, reported MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin.
The motion was based on the fact that Carroll, a writer who sued Trump for defamation after he disparaged her rape allegations against him as a lie to sell books, deleted some emails she received containing death threats against her, which Trump and his lawyer Alina Habba tried to argue was deliberate misconduct — but Kaplan found nothing of the sort.
"While he still has not entered judgment, Judge Lew Kaplan did just issue an opinion denying Trump's motion for a mistrial and sanctions based on Carroll's purported deletion of emails or Twitter messages containing death threats," wrote Rubin on social media.
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"In short, Trump's team first learned of the deletions in Jan. 2023 and failed to follow up. Nor did they obtain or present clear evidence at trial of what Carroll deleted or when, much less what documents they requested through discovery," she continued. "And perhaps most importantly, they failed to demonstrate that the missing messages would have *helped* Trump's case, a showing without which they could not prove prejudice to Trump's defense."
Ultimately, wrote Rubin, "The bottom line, says Kaplan, is that what Trump's team pointed to as evidence of discovery misconduct was both too late and too imprecise to warrant either a mistrial or other sanctions, especially since they never showed that the messages were unrecoverable."
The trial, which was purely about assessing damages, concluded with the jury awarding $83.3 million in damages to Carroll.
