Donald Trump appears at a rally. E. Jean Carroll enters federal court in Manhattan for the first day of trial against him. (Photos l-r: Emily Elconin/Getty Images; AP Photo/Brittainy Newman)
Donald Trump’s attorney began the week by filing a lengthy motion for a mistrial with a detailed list of seven complaints that he claims tilted the scales toward accuser E. Jean Carroll’s allegations that the former president raped her in the mid-1990s. The federal judge in the case unceremoniously shot down that request without comment, however, on Monday morning.
“Denied,” Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan remarked.
Kaplan had not identified any part of the 18-page filing by Trump’s attorney Joe Tacopina, who challenged several of the judge’s pre-trial and evidentiary rulings. The judge simply referred to the motion as one that landed on his desk this morning. Tacopina complained that Kaplan repeatedly sustained several objections of his questions as argumentative and rejected his motions to preclude testimony by writer Natasha Stoynoff, another Trump accuser on Carroll’s witness list.
During cross-examination, Tacopina outlined the “Modest Proposal” in the title of Carroll’s book “What Do We Need Men For?” The book proposed disposing of all men to Montana for retraining.
When Tacopina asked if that applied to the men in the courtroom, Carroll replied: “You understand that that was said as a satire.”
At that point, the judge interjected with a question for the witness: “It comes from Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’ 700 years ago, right?”
“Yes,” Carroll replied.
In fact, Swift’s satire proposing cooking and eating Irish children to ease to the potato famine was written in the 18th century. Kaplan corrected himself on the chronology after the jury left, but that was not Tacopina’s complaint about the line.
In his mistrial motion, Tacopina bristled at the judge spelling out the literary reference at all.
“It was not for the Court to provide evidence from the Bench to corroborate Plaintiff’s position in a way that suggested to the Jury favoritism of any one party,” Tacopina wrote.
At another point of her questioning, Carroll told a jury that her fears came true about Trump trying to crush her with legal might when she publicly accused him. She said her friend Carol Martin, a TV anchorwoman on her witness list, warned that Trump had hundreds of attorneys.
“I was afraid Donald Trump would retaliate, which exactly is what he did,” Carroll said. “That’s exactly. One of my biggest fears came absolutely true.”
“Okay,” Tacopina said.
“He has two tables full of lawyers here today,” Carroll said. “It came absolutely true.”
Tacopina said that he tried to counteract that remark from Carroll, when the judge asked him to “move along.”
“Plaintiff’s testimony about Defendant having ‘two tables full of lawyers’ conveyed to the Jury the wrongful impression that she is somehow disadvantaged in these legal proceedings by a lack of resources, which could not be further from the truth,” Tacopina wrote.
Former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner called Tacopina’s motion “performative.”
“He will neither get a mistrial nor move Judge Kaplan to be more favorable to Trump,” said Epner, a partner at Rottenberg Lipman Rich PC.
Indeed, Judge Kaplan promptly denied it and sustained multiple objections about Tacopina’s continuing cross-examination on Monday.
Read the mistrial motion here.
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