Carroll v. Trump
- Lewis Kaplan
- 1:20-cv-07311
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
In Carroll v. Trump, Judge Kaplan excluded Trump’s rebuttal expert testimony and denied Carroll’s other evidentiary requests as moot.
E. Jean Carroll and Donald J. Trump, particularly the evidence available at the damages trial.
What happened
In Carroll v. Trump, E. Jean Carroll asked the court to rule on six matters before trial. Five requests concerned liability evidence, but the court had already limited the trial to damages, making those requests moot.
The remaining request sought to exclude Robert J. Fisher, whom Donald J. Trump proposed as a rebuttal expert to Professor Ashlee Humphreys. Carroll argued that Fisher’s analysis was unreliable. The court agreed that his report lacked a reliable foundation in facts, data, or explained experience and included matters that were not proper expert testimony.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan granted Carroll’s motion to exclude Fisher’s testimony and denied the motion as moot in all other respects.
The detailed version
- Carroll v. Trump · No. 1:20-cv-07311
- Lewis Kaplan
- Oct. 5, 2023
Background
E. Jean Carroll moved before trial for rulings on six evidentiary matters. Five requests concerned the liability issue—whether Donald J. Trump defamed Carroll in statements he made while president in 2019 in response to her public accusation that he sexually assaulted her. The court had previously decided that the trial would address damages only, based on its decision granting Carroll’s motion for partial summary judgment. The five liability-related requests therefore were moot.
The sixth request concerned Trump’s proposed rebuttal expert, Robert J. Fisher. Carroll intended to call Professor Ashlee Humphreys, Ph.D., to testify about the dissemination and impact of Trump’s allegedly defamatory statements and the potential cost of a reputation-repair campaign. Trump proposed Fisher to rebut Humphreys’s conclusions. Carroll sought to exclude Fisher’s testimony, principally arguing that his analysis was unreliable.
Court’s analysis
The court relied in part on its earlier ruling in a prior related proceeding, No. 22-cv-10016, involving Fisher’s proposed rebuttal testimony. In that earlier ruling, the court found no reliable basis for Fisher’s conclusions because he did not explain how his experience informed his criticisms of Humphreys’s proposal and did not rely on specific facts, data, or evidence.
The court found that Fisher’s report in this case had the same defects. The first six and a half pages of the twelve-page report contained legal opinions, arguments about the evidence, and other matters that were not proper subjects of expert testimony. In the remaining pages, Fisher discussed Humphreys’s opinions about reputational harm and the proposed reputation-repair program, but did not explain how his experience or other facts and data supported his criticisms. The court also found that Fisher’s conclusion that Carroll’s longstanding positive image might offset most of Trump’s remarks lacked the factual, evidentiary, or experiential foundation required of an expert witness.
Disposition
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan granted Carroll’s motion in limine to the extent it sought to exclude Fisher’s testimony. The court denied the motion as moot in all other respects. The opinion does not state a separate ruling on the merits of the underlying defamation claim in this order.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.