A high-profile criminal lawyer who failed to keep a violent insurrectionist client out of prison has joined former President Donald Trump’s defense team battling sexual assault charges against him.
The US District Court for the Southern District of New York was notified in a filing Tuesday that Joseph Tacopina “appears as counsel for Defendant Donald J. Trump” in a lawsuit filed by author E. Jean Carroll, who accuses Trump of raping her. in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s.
Tacopina represented Julian Khater, who was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison last week for his role in the storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. Khater admitted to using a bear mace to spray several police officers during the siege, including Brian Sicknick, who died in the next day after two strokes.
Tacopina has taken in several well-known defendants, including the American Natalee Holloway who is suspected of killing Joran van der Sloot during his vacation in Aruba in 2005. Van der Sloot remains the main suspect in Holloway’s death but has not been convicted in the case. (He served 28 years in prison for murdering his date Stephany Flores.)
It was initially widely reported in the media that Tacopina had replaced Trump’s high-profile lawyer Alina Habba after she and Trump were fined nearly $1 million by a Florida judge last month for bringing a lawsuit that the judge called “reckless” that amounted to “abuse.” from court proceedings.”
But Habba insisted he is still part of the defense team in Carroll’s case and called the report “fake news.”
Carroll sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after he angrily denied allegations of sexual battery in a White House interview. He claimed that Carroll was not his “type” and that he was just looking for publicity.
Late last year, she filed another lawsuit against him under the recently passed Adult Survivors Act, which temporarily lifts the statute of limitations for a year on civil lawsuits for sexual assault.
Trump’s lawyers have denied the sexual assault allegations. As for defamation, he argued that anything Trump says as president is protected from legal action. But Trump repeated some of the same attacks in a post on Truth Social earlier this year. He called Carroll’s allegations a “complete job” and a “hoax and lie.”
Whatever protections he has as president may disappear when he repeats these attacks as a private citizen. Because of Trump’s latest comments, Carroll’s lawyers included another count of defamation in her sexual battery case.
Trump’s recently released deposition regarding the latest suit has been particularly vicious. “I don’t know anything about this nut job,” he said, and she threatened to sue him, according to the transcript.
As for Carroll not being “the type,” Trump misidentified a photo of the writer as his second ex-wife, Marla Maples, during his deposition.
Tacopina previously criticized Trump’s claim that attacking Carroll over sexual battery allegations was part of his “official” duties as president.
“Trump is calling rape victims … lying not acting in an official capacity,” he told CNBC in 2020.