"Trump lawsuit: Judge allows questioning of E. Jean Carroll on lawsuit funding by Democratic donor Reid Hoffman"

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On April 15, a federal judge ruled that lawyers for former President Donald Trump could question writer E. Jean Carroll under oath about the funding of her lawsuit against him, in which she alleges he raped her in the mid-1990s. The judge, Lewis Kaplan, rejected a request by Trump’s legal team to delay the start of the civil trial on April 25 in Manhattan by one month.

Carroll’s lawsuit also alleges that Trump defamed her in the way he denied her allegations when she went public with them while he was president. Kaplan allowed “a brief and carefully circumscribed examination of that narrow question” of Carroll’s knowledge of Reid Hoffman’s assistance. Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn and a major Democratic donor who funded Carroll’s case against Trump. Kaplan said he would later determine whether the issue could be raised at the upcoming trial.

Trump’s lawyers, Joseph Tacopina and Alina Habba, had accused Carroll’s attorneys of deliberately failing for months to disclose that Hoffman had funded her case against the former president. They said they received a letter on April 12 stating that their client “now recalls that at some point her counsel secured additional funding from a nonprofit organization to offset certain expenses and legal fees.” On April 14, Carroll’s attorneys disclosed that Hoffman was the “primary backer” of that nonprofit group, American Future Republic. Hoffman has spent millions of dollars backing Democrats in congressional races and reportedly funding efforts to oppose Trump in elections.

In their letter to the judge, Trump’s lawyers wrote that the revelation “raises significant concerns as to Plaintiff’s bias and motive” in filing the suit. Carroll’s lawyers called the efforts to disrupt the trial “baseless.” They challenged Trump’s lawyers’ requests for last-minute changes to the trial schedule, saying that it was “facially absurd” for Trump to insist that Hoffman, who had never met or communicated with Carroll, had somehow influenced her testimony.

Carroll had testified in an October deposition that no one else was paying her legal fees and that she was unclear about who was covering case expenses. In a separate letter to the judge, her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said that Carroll had “recollected additional information” related to the exchange from her deposition while preparing for the trial. She promptly disclosed this to Trump’s counsel, her lawyer said.

It was unclear how much money Hoffman provided for Carroll’s litigation. Dmitri Mehlhorn, one of Hoffman’s philanthropic advisors, told CNBC that since 2017 they have provided third-party funding to legal efforts that aim to “protect our citizens from violent threats.” In those instances, “we have not met the plaintiffs, we do not decide who the organization chooses to support and the clients generally do not know our identity,” he said in an emailed statement.

The trial will start on April 25 as scheduled, with Carroll facing up to 90 minutes of questioning about Hoffman’s funding.