Alina Habba Being Unfairly ‘Nitpicked’ After Court Clashes —Attorney

A federal attorney has defended Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba, who has been sharply criticized by some observers for her performance in the former president’s New York defamation case.

Habba’s combative style and alleged lapses in correct court procedure has spawned a large number of jokes and internet memes.

But Colleen Kerwick, a federal attorney who practices in New York, told Newsweek that female attorneys are constantly being held to an unfair standard and critics are “nitpicking” Habba’s performance.

“Female lawyers already have an incredibly hard task of avoiding appearing too soft or too strident and too aggressive or not aggressive enough, so I’d rather herald her meteoric growth as an attorney than nitpick at her opportunities for further growth as an attorney and counselor at law,” Kerwick said.

She said Habba “was adequately handling run-of-the-mill cases such as uncontested divorce, foreclosure, and slip-and-fall accidents before working her way into Donald Trump’s circles.”

Kerwick said that Habba showed her skills in the case of Cohen v. Barr. In November 2022, a New York judge dismissed a lawsuit by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, accusing Trump, former Attorney General William Barr and others of abruptly returning him to prison in retaliation for writing a tell-all memoir.

“[Habba] fought above her weight class for Trump and wrote a winning motion to dismiss in Cohen v Barr, Trump et al,” Kerwick said.

Former federal attorney Joyce Vance wrote in her blog Civil Discourse on January 18 that Habba’s lack of courtroom skills in the E. Jean Carroll case showed that Trump cannot get a good lawyer.

“Today, her lack of courtroom experience was on full display. She failed to stand when addressing the judge, and she failed to take her seat after he ruled—that’s the stuff of trial advocacy 101,” Vance wrote.

“I think her capabilities help us understand that Trump, who as a former president should have access to the finest lawyering the profession has to offer, does not. He is so toxic that most of the good lawyers won’t touch him. It’s shocking that a former president is represented by a lawyer who doesn’t seem to know her way around a courtroom and continues to antagonize the judge by violating his pre-trial rulings, especially since the lawyer on the other side is Roberta Kaplan (no relationship to the Judge), an A++ caliber lawyer.”

On January 17, Habba asked Judge Lewis Kaplan: “How do you suggest I proceed?” while showing an exhibit to the plaintiff, E. Jean Carroll.

Kaplan replied: “Show it to her, ask if she recognizes it.”

Habba then asked Carroll: “Do you recognize it?” before Judge Kaplan snapped that there was no letter or number attached to the exhibit.

“It’s not marked. It should be marked. Do it appropriately. Do it overnight. They. Need. To. Be. Premarked,” he said.

Kerwick said Habba’s writing skills in Carroll v Trump “are now on par with white shoe litigators.”

“While she was publicly criticized for struggling to authenticate evidence, she can learn how to do that. Trump likely values her for her qualities that cannot be learned, like zealousness and loyalty,” Kerwick added.

Habba’s family are Christians who came to America to flee persecution in Iraq. Habba grew up in New Jersey and is known to be one of Trump’s staunchest defenders.

In a jury trial in May, the former president was found liable for sexual assault and defamation of Carroll. The jury found that Trump sexually assaulted the former Elle writer in a Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York in the 1990s and then defamed her character in 2022 by claiming the assault never happened as Carroll “wasn’t my type.”

She is suing again for comments he made in 2019, when she first launched her sexual assault claim against him.

In those 2019 comments, Trump falsely claimed that Carroll was “trying to sell a new book” and suggested she might be a Democratic operative.