LinkedIn’s co-founder Reid Hoffman helped fund lawsuit accusing Trump of rape

NEW YORK – Mr Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a harsh critic of former president Donald Trump, has helped pay for a lawsuit by Ms E. Jean Carroll, a New York Magazine writer who sued Trump for rape and defamation, according to newly filed court papers in the case.

Mr Hoffman’s support for the lawsuit, which was first disclosed in a letter to a judge on Thursday by Trump’s lawyers, has sparked a sharp dispute in the case, which is scheduled for

trial in federal court in Manhattan on April 25.

In a 2019 book and excerpt in New York Magazine, Ms Carroll accused Trump of pushing her against a dressing room wall in luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan in the mid-1990s, saying he then pulled down her tights, unzipped his trousers and forced himself upon her.

Trump’s lawyers accuse Ms Carroll of concealing Mr Hoffman’s role, which they said they learnt of only this week from her lawyers.

They added that the disclosure raises “significant questions” about Ms Carroll’s credibility and whether her allegations are, as Trump has said, a “hoax” brought “to advance a political agenda”.

They asked for a one-month postponement so they could investigate the funding issue.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan on Thursday said he would allow the lawyers the opportunity to conduct a narrow inquiry into the funding issue but declined to delay the case.

Ms Carroll’s lawyers in their own letter argued that the financial support is irrelevant to her legal claims and that she had nothing to do with obtaining the outside funding.

They noted that it was not until September 2020, almost a year after she filed the first of what became two lawsuits against Trump, that their firm obtained the funding to help pay “certain costs and fees”.

They said Trump’s effort to delay the trial – earlier this week, he asked that it be delayed because of a “deluge of prejudicial media coverage” concerning his recent criminal indictment in New York – is “his latest transparent effort to keep a jury from deciding Carroll’s claims”.

Mr Hoffman is a billionaire tech entrepreneur known for co-founding LinkedIn, which went public in 2011 and was sold to Microsoft for US$26 billion (S$34 billion) in 2016.

He has a long history of funding Democratic candidates and causes, including those specifically designed to counteract Trump’s influence.

Mr Dmitri Mehlhorn, a philanthropic adviser for Mr Hoffman, said that since 2017 they have acted as “third-party funders who support people in obtaining their legal rights”.

“Trump and his defenders keep trying to change the subject because they don’t want a neutral court of law to evaluate his behaviour,” Mr Mehlhorn added.

He said they had made an earlier grant through a non-profit entity to support a different public interest lawsuit being handled by the firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink, which later took up Ms Carroll’s case.

He added that later, in September 2020, her lawyer asked if money from that grant could be used for the suit.

“We had no prior knowledge at the time of the original grant that our funding would go to support her case in particular,” Mr Mehlhorn said.

He declined to specify the size of the original grant.

The clash over Mr Hoffman’s role is just the latest twist in litigation stemming from the allegation by Ms Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist.

Trump denies her accusation, saying he has never met her, that she is “totally lying” and that he cannot have raped her because she is not his “type”.

Ms Carroll, saying his comments damaged her reputation, sued him in 2019 for defamation.

She sued him again last year

– this time accusing him of rape – under a new state law in New York that grants adults a one-time window to sue those who they say abused them even if the statute of limitations has long expired.

It is that lawsuit that is scheduled for trial this month.

The original defamation case has been tangled in appeals.

On Thursday, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals issued a 41-page ruling that declined to decide whether Trump was acting in his capacity as president when he made the disparaging comments.

The ruling was a partial victory for Ms Carroll because

the defamation lawsuit will continue,

and because the DC court laid out for New York judges a detailed explanation about when an employer can be held liable for the actions of an employee – an explanation that appears favourable to Ms Carroll.

After she sued Trump for defamation, the Justice Department intervened under a law that substitutes the government as the defendant when federal officials are sued for official acts – meaning a case must be dismissed. That raised the question of whether Trump was acting as president when he talked about Ms Carroll.

In October 2020, Judge Kaplan rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to substitute the government as the defendant, ruling that Trump’s comments had “no relationship to the official business of the United States”.

But a higher court asked the DC Court of Appeals to decide whether Trump was acting as a private person or as an employee of the federal government.

Had the DC court ruled in favour of Trump, that would have effectively brought an end to the defamation case.

But it baulked, saying there were not yet enough facts in the record to make that determination. NYTIMES