(Daily Signal)—The lawyer for E. Jean Carroll, the former magazine columnist who accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault, is facing scrutiny over outside funding of the case by a left-leaning billionaire.
The National Legal and Policy Center, a watchdog group, filed a bar complaint with the Attorney Grievance Committee of the New York State Supreme Court against Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan, alleging she was not transparent about left-leaning billionaire Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, helping bankroll Carroll’s lawsuit.
Tax filings from 2023 for Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic, show it paid $7 million to Carroll’s lawyers to help cover legal expenses, according to the Capital Research Center, which monitors nonprofits.
Carroll wrote the 2019 book, “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal,” in which she said Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store during the 1990s. Trump denied the allegation and called her a “whack job.”
She sued him in 2019 for defamation and was awarded $83.3 million by a jury. She sued again in 2022 for remarks Trump made, and she won a separate $5 million judgment. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Trump’s appeal in the $5 million case, but his appeal in the $83.3 million judgment is pending. On Wednesday, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals denied Trump’s effort to pause the $5 million payment to Carroll.
The NLPC’s complaint says Kaplan failed to inform Trump’s lawyers and the court when she knew that her client, Carroll, provided false information during a deposition.
In October 2022, Carroll was asked under oath if “anyone else [is] paying your legal fees.”
Carroll answered, “No.”
The bar complaint says, “At that moment, Kaplan knew that answer was false but waited almost six months later, until the eve of the trial, to correct the record by informing opposing counsel and the court that Hoffman had funded the lawsuits.”
The complaint says that “hybrid fees” are ethical in some instances, but suggests there could be a problem with an “excessive fee” under New York ethics rules for lawyers.
“Did Ms. Kaplan charge Ms. Carroll the maximum one-third contingency fee and, on top of that, was paid an additional hourly fee from Reid Hoffman’s nonprofit for certain work?” the complaint asks. “If so, the total fee charged would be an excessive fee, even if the excess over the contingency fee was paid by a third party.” A spokesperson for the New York law firm Kaplan Martin, where Kaplan practices, did not comment on the complaint but said Trump already litigated this issue of Hoffman’s subsidy at the U.S. 2nd Court of Appeals, which rejected the claim about a lack of disclosure.
The 2nd Circuit determined, “There was no evidence to suggest that Ms. Carroll was personally involved in securing the funding, interacted with the funder, received an invoice showing the arrangement before or after her counsel received the outside funding, or had discussed the arrangement with anyone between learning of it in September 2020 and being deposed in October 2022.”
The appeals court determined that “Carroll’s prior statement on the litigation funding was not sufficiently probative of her credibility.” It added it showed that “Ms. Carroll was simply not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs.”
However, Paul Kamenar, counsel for the National Legal and Policy Center who drafted the 15-page bar complaint against Kaplan, said the 2nd Circuit had nothing to say about Kaplan’s ethical obligations.
“Not surprising that Roberta Kaplan did not deny any of these allegations of ethical misconduct in our complaint,” Kamenar told the Daily Signal. “Instead, she cites the Second Circuit that only dealt with E. Jean Carroll’s contact with Reid Hoffman, not Kaplan’s.”
Kamenar said courts have historically expected some information to be presented about outside funders, to ensure an outside funder isn’t pulling the strings with an attorney, rather than the client.
This year, the Chicago-based American Future Republic was reportedly the target of a probe by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois concerning donations used in the Carroll case.
Hoffman previously said in a 2023 Washington Post interview that he never tried to keep his funding secret, and, “My team looked at it, thought that her [Carroll’s] voice should be heard because she was challenging someone who was so much more wealthy and powerful—it shouldn’t be squashed.”
The Daily Signal left several voicemail inquiries over the past week with the number listed for the American Future Republic’s filing with the Internal Revenue Service, as well as on other websites. The 2024 filing shows the organization has $7.8 million in assets, with revenue for that year of $286,735.
A spokesperson for Hoffman did not respond to Daily Signal inquiries for this story, nor did a spokesperson from Greylock, where Hoffman is part of the investing team.
