Trump Requests Mistrial in E. Jean Carroll Case Due to Missing Death Threat Emails

(Left) President Donald Trump comes out of the Oval Office from the White House on Sept. 16, 2019. (Right) E. Jean Carroll (C) leaves following her trial at Manhattan Federal Court in New York on May 8, 2023. Mandel Ngan, Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump’s legal team has asked the judge in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against the former president to declare a mistrial, arguing that Ms. Carroll failed to preserve key evidence by deleting emails that purportedly included death threats.

Trump attorney Alina Habba made the request to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in a letter dated Jan. 19, in which she asked him to toss the case because the trial was ruined when Ms. Carroll admitted in court testimony that she had deleted an unknown number of emails and social media messages containing death threats.

Ms. Habba said Ms. Carroll “failed to take reasonable steps to preserve relevant evidence. In fact, she did much worse—she actively deleted evidence which she now attempts to rely on in establishing her damages claim.”

Ms. Carroll’s lawyers have made the purported death threats an important reason why their client is asking the jury to award her $10 million in compensatory damages and millions more in punitive damages. They blame the death threats on President Trump’s public remarks about Ms. Carroll.

“Plaintiff recounted to the jury that she received vicious death threats on June 21, 2019, which she directly attributed to President Trump’s June 21, 2019 statement,” Ms. Habba wrote in the letter. “And she sought to substantiate her claim for emotional harm by describing how she felt like an attack would happen ‘right now’ and that her heart would race.”

“However, it cannot be established that these messages existed at all, since Plaintiff deleted them,” she added.

In her letter, Ms. Habba said the deletions are significant because the missing evidence plays a key role in Ms. Carroll’s demands.

Ms. Habba then asked the judge to declare a mistrial to preclude Ms. Carroll from seeking damages related to purported death threats or to include an adverse inference charge against Ms. Carroll, which is basically an instruction to the jury to weigh the missing evidence against her.

Ms. Carroll’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the mistrial request.

The trial started on Jan. 16 and is set to resume on Monday.

President Trump has denied any wrongdoing in the case.

Writer E. Jean Carroll leaves a Manhattan court house after a jury found former President Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s, in New York City, on May 9, 2023. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Lawsuit Background

This legal saga stems from a defamation lawsuit Ms. Carroll filed over allegedly defamatory comments President Trump made about her in 2019 when she first publicly accused him of sexual assault.

In 2019, Ms. Carroll accused President Trump of having raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1995 or 1996.

After President Trump denied Ms. Carroll’s allegations in 2019—saying that “she’s not my type”—Ms. Carroll filed a lawsuit accusing the former president of having defamed her. The lawsuit wound its way through state, federal, and appellate courts in New York and Washington, without material consequences.

In 2022, the New York state legislature passed the Adult Survivor Act, which amended state law to give victims of certain sexual offenses a one-year window, beginning on Nov. 24, 2022, to file a civil lawsuit against alleged offenders. Ms. Carroll then filed a second lawsuit on Nov. 24, 2022, under this Act, which went to trial.

On May 9, 2023, Ms. Carroll was awarded $5 million in this second lawsuit: about $3 million for a defamation charge and about $2 million for a civil battery charge.

Former President Donald Trump sits in the New York State Supreme Court during his civil fraud trial in New York City, on Jan. 11, 2024. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

A day after the verdict—on May 10—President Trump appeared at a town hall event on CNN, where he called Carroll a “whack job” and said her claims against him were fake.