By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) -The judge overseeing writer E. Jean Carroll’s latest civil defamation case against Donald Trump postponed the trial until Tuesday, after one juror reported feeling ill and one or more parents of Trump’s lead lawyer tested positive for COVID-19.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan on Monday sent one of the nine jurors home to get a COVID test after the juror reported feeling hot and nauseous.
Alina Habba, Trump’s lawyer, reported having contracted a fever over the weekend, after dining for a few hours with her parents on Friday. She and her co-counsel, Michael Madaio, tested negative for COVID-19 on Monday.
Kaplan also said he will decide later whether to let Trump testify on Wednesday, so that the former U.S. president can be in New Hampshire on Tuesday for state’s Republican presidential primary.
Habba had asked for the delay. Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who is not related to the judge, responded that her client’s case was nearly finished, and she would prefer to possibly finish on Tuesday, with or without Trump.
The judge separately denied Trump’s request for a mistrial, which arose from Carroll’s having testified that she destroyed emailed death threats she received after first accusing Trump of rape.
Jurors will determine how much Trump should pay Carroll for defaming her in June 2019, when he denied raping her in the mid-1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in Manhattan.
Trump has consistently denied that anything happened and accused Carroll of making up the incident to boost sales of her then-new memoir.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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