Judge tells Trump to hurry up and figure out who's representing him in new E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, saying he's 'known this was coming for months'

President Donald Trump speaks to the media after voting at a polling station setup in the Morton and Barbara Mandel Recreation Center on November 08, 2022 in Palm Beach, Florida.

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• The judge presiding over Trump's E. Jean Carroll lawsuit had stern words for the former president.
• Judge Lewis Kaplan seemed displeased Trump hadn't decided who's representing him in the new lawsuit.
• Trump "has known this was coming for months," Kaplan said. 

A judge had some stern words for former President Donald Trump on Tuesday during a status conference in writer E. Jean Carroll's defamation lawsuit. 

Carroll is suing Trump for unspecified damages in the Southern District of New York, arguing that he attacked her reputation by denying her rape allegation. In an excerpt from her memoir published by New York Magazine in June 2019, Carroll claimed that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room sometime in the fall of 1995 or spring of 1996. At the time the article was published, Trump denied ever knowing Carroll and said she wasn't his "type." 

The New York federal judge presiding over the case, Lewis A. Kaplan, held a call with attorneys representing Carroll and Trump on Tuesday to discuss the schedule going forward and a second lawsuit that Carroll plans to file later this week against Trump. 

Alina Habba, one of Trump's attorneys, said she wasn't sure whether she would even be hired to represent Trump in the second lawsuit. Kaplan expressed that it was about time he made that decision.

E. Jean Carroll in a New York courtroom for her defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump on March 4, 2020.

Seth Wenig/AP

"Your client in the present action, Ms. Habba, has known this was coming for months and he would be well advised to decide who's representing him in it because that will have to be resolved promptly," Kaplan said. 

Attorneys for Trump and Carroll declined to comment when reached by Insider after the conference on Tuesday. 

In court filings last week, Carroll's attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to Judge Kaplan) said her client plans to file a second lawsuit against Trump as early as Thanksgiving, when a new New York law goes into place temporarily allowing the filing of sexual assault lawsuits in cases where the statute of limitations have expired. The second lawsuit will contain a complaint of battery and a second complaint of defamation, for comments Trump made about Carroll in October of this year. Carroll's first lawsuit, filing in November 2019, dealt with his denials immediately after her article was published. 

On the call on Tuesday, Roberta Kaplan said that Trump's lawyers have known their intention to file the second lawsuit since August. 

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