Alina Habba repeatedly clashed with New York judge Lewis A Kaplan in court for the former president’s civil defamation trial

Remarks made by Donald Trump lawyer Alina Habba in a recent interview about “faking being smart” resurfaced after she endured two tough days in court during her client’s civil trial for defamation damages.

Ms Habba repeatedly clashed with New York judge Lewis A Kaplan in court on Tuesday and Wednesday, during the former president’s civil trial to determine damages for defaming columnist E Jean Carroll.

These included the response to repeated objections, and her failure to stand up when making them, as well as continuing to petition for a postponement of the trial so that the former president can attend the funeral of his mother-in-law.

After a further attempt of the latter on Wednesday, Ms Habba was issued a sharp rebuke from Judge Kaplan. She responded by asking the judge not to speak to her in that way.

“I don’t like to be spoken to that way. And we are going to be here for several days,” she said. “I am asking your honour to please refrain from speaking to me in that manner.”

    • grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I remember feeling like this in junior high. There was this group of athletic dudes who were mind numbingly offensive to everyone. Shoving people, locker stuffing, knocking books out your hand, tripping kids on stairs… Just constant abuse and scorn on anyone not in their group. And these guys were popular. I won’t say every girl liked them because there were lots of smart girls. But a lot of girls liked them and guys thought they were cool, etc. It blew my mind that we weren’t all ostracizing them for being obnoxious, abusive bullies.

      It was junior high. I get it. I moved on.

      But Trump’s success brings that feeling back. There’s no logic to it. It’s a creepy mammalian subconscious need to stay on the good side of the bully so you don’t end up targeted. Or maybe you see someone acting like you would like to act but can’t get away with it.

      I have no idea but I blows my mind every time I think about and I know it’s what is wrong with the world. No question about that.

      • ddh@lemmy.sdf.org
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        10 months ago

        There is a logic to it. They demonstrate their power by behaving badly without consequence, and the worse they behave the more powerful they must be. The one thing Trump is right about is that he’s treated very unfairly by the courts.

    • skozzii@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      I have lost respect for many people in my life because of this, and their inability to see reality somehow when it comes to this one single issue.

    • Nightwingdragon@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      How is everything related to this man such a fucking joke and HOW IS HE SO POPULAR

      • His 2016 campaign was initially seen as a joke (Even by Trump, who just wanted to use it to launch his next grift anyway). It essentially became a meme that quickly spiraled out of control. People voted for Trump “for teh lulz” early on, the same way they voted for the 15 year old kid, “Deez Nuts”, and other joke candidates. The problem is that unlike those other joke cases, Trump didn’t go away once the joke was over. He started winning.

      • He started ramping up the bigotry and racism, and just started spewing out what people wanted to hear. And then when the racists and bigots realized that “one of them” actually had a non-zero chance of winning the primary, they started jumping on board. Then you add in a whole bunch of people who liked everything he was saying but hadn’t yet learned that he had no way of actually delivering on his promises, and suddenly you’ve got the “everyman”. The man who’s going to “tell it like it is”. And he got away with it because nobody had ever peeked behind the curtain, and there was no appetite to do so so long as this man continued telling them what they wanted to hear.

      • Even beyond the dedicated MAGA base, he has been very successful in finding a boogeyman to point to to get even moderate Republicans to begrudgingly support him. If it’s not those dirty Mexicans coming up here to take your job away, it’s kids who want to pretend to be the opposite sex so they can enter the girls’ bathroom and molest your daughter. Or its about a woman who actually has the audacity to want to murder their baby without at least getting the blessing of their local politicians (remember Dr. Oz?) first. Or the gays that are using rainbows to recruit your children. Whatever it is. But Trump knows that if you give a man a “them” to blame for all of his troubles, he’ll follow you anywhere. And Trump is a master of blaming everyone else.

      • Having exposed exactly how many racists and bigots are in this country, he was able to start threatening the rest of the party into submission by (correctly) pointing out that those racists and bigots now dictate their political careers and that their choices are to either march in lockstep behind him or commit political suicide. Most chose to either get on board or retire. The rest saw the end of their careers in Congress.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      10 months ago

      I guess people see themselves in a dumb guy just coasting through and seemingly succeeding against all odds. Obviously, they didn’t get billions of dollars from daddy to enable that.

    • RagingRobot@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Because she’s externally beautiful? Or because she was one of the only lawyers left willing to work with him?

      Either way she is embarrassing herself. It’s painful to watch but also I want to see him go down so bad. He tried to say my vote against him didn’t count. He’s a criminal.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Because she was the only one dumb enough to work without payment up front?

      I mean, she’s clearly not his type…

  • TWeaK
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    10 months ago

    No surprise, Trump famously said he doesn’t hire people who are smarter than him.

    • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      I hadn’t seen a picture of her until now, but it’s really apparent that he hired her because she looks like Melania. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s sexually assaulting her.

      • TWeaK
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        10 months ago

        I think she might actually be dumb enough to consent.

    • Bdtrngl@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I was going to make a comment about how hard it would be to find anyone that dumb and then remembered all the mouth breathing red hats out there.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      No she’s not.

      There’s training requirements for how to handle food Safely. Like, ServeSafe courses and stuff

      • stown@sedd.it
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        10 months ago

        It’s my constitutional right to have poop on my fingers while making your sandwich!

  • Nightwingdragon@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Let’s be realistic. She was hired because (a) no lawyer with any desire to keep their reputation intact would touch this case with a 10 foot pole, and (b) because she looks like a smaller, more pissed off version of Melania. Which means he didn’t hire her for her legal skills. He hired her because she’s a starstruck, young lawyer hoping to be able to boost her career and he sees an opportunity to get her into bed.

    And she has two goals, neither one of them involve winning the case. (1) Spew out as many frivilous monkey wrenches into the works as possible, knowing full well the judge is going to rule against 99.9% of them, so Trump will be able to leave the courtroom every day and twist those rulings in order to show that the judge is “biased” against him in his glorified campaign rallies, and (2) To delay as much as possible until after the election in hopes that Trump wins and is just able to make everything go away.

    (And yes, including the state stuff. If he wins the election, he would just hand-wave it away and basically tell the states “You’ve made your decision, now let’s see you enforce it”, and he’d most likely be correct in his belief that either the states would lose any appetite for trying to enforce anything, and the courts would likely say that the need for him to carry out his presidential duties supersedes the states’ needs to enforce punishment and that they’d have to wait until his 2nd term is over before pursuing him if they wanted to try.)

  • btaf45@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    “faking being smart”

    This is everybody connected to Convicted Sex Offender Treason Trump.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Remarks made by Donald Trump lawyer Alina Habba in a recent interview about “faking being smart” resurfaced after she endured two tough days in court during her client’s civil trial for defamation damages.

    Ms Habba repeatedly clashed with New York judge Lewis A Kaplan in court on Tuesday and Wednesday, during the former president’s civil trial to determine damages for defaming columnist E Jean Carroll.

    These included the response to repeated objections, and her failure to stand up when making them, as well as continuing to petition for a postponement of the trial so that the former president can attend the funeral of his mother-in-law.

    Social media users were quick to return to a clip of Ms Habba during a recent interview on a 4 January episode of the PBD podcast, in which she said she would “rather be pretty than smart.”

    Sharing the clip on Wednesday, Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of Meidas Touch, wrote: “Alina Habba proved in court today that this statement is categorically false.”

    She later asked the judge “how should I proceed?” when questioning Ms Carroll about tweets she had received and then requested a mistrial on grounds that “evidence had been deleted” – which was immediately denied.


    The original article contains 494 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!