It took the National Legal and Policy Center months to research and draft its 15-page ethics complaint against Roberta Kaplan, the Manhattan litigator who won E. Jean Carroll two headline-making verdicts against President Donald Trump. It took New York’s attorney discipline system 32 days to make the complaint disappear — with a dismissal that, according to the complainant, devoted exactly two sentences to the substance.
On August 3, Jorge Dopico, chief attorney of the Attorney Grievance Committee of the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department, sent NLPC a letter rejecting the complaint it had filed on July 2. No investigation preceded the rejection, NLPC says. The matter never went before the full committee. A single screening attorney reviewed it and closed the file.
Whatever one thinks of the underlying allegations — and there are serious arguments on both sides — the episode is a case study in the way attorney discipline actually works in New York: quietly, quickly, and with almost no obligation to explain itself.
What the Complaint Alleged
The complaint centers on a moment from Carroll’s October 2022 deposition. Asked under oath whether “anyone else [is] paying your legal fees,” Carroll answered, “No.”
That answer was not accurate. Carroll’s litigation against Trump was supported by outside money — specifically, funding arranged through a nonprofit bankrolled by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor. Tax filings from 2023 for Hoffman’s nonprofit, American Future Republic, show it paid $7 million to Carroll’s lawyers to help cover legal expenses, according to records compiled by InfluenceWatch and reported by the Daily Signal.
NLPC’s complaint alleged that Kaplan knew the deposition answer was false when it was given — and that she waited nearly six months, until the eve of trial, to correct the record with the court and Trump’s attorneys. Under New York’s Rules of Professional Conduct, a lawyer who comes to know that her client has offered false material evidence has a duty to take “reasonable remedial measures,” including, if necessary, disclosure to the tribunal. The timing of a correction matters: a disclosure made months late, on the courthouse steps, is very different from one made promptly.
The complaint raised a second set of issues as well. Kaplan represented Carroll under a contingency-fee agreement while simultaneously receiving millions in third-party funding from the Hoffman-backed entity. NLPC questioned whether Carroll was properly informed that a third party was already paying her bills — an arrangement that implicates New York’s rules on third-party payment of legal fees, which require the client’s informed consent — and whether the combination of a contingency stake plus outside funding amounted to an excessive fee.
A Two-Sentence Answer
The grievance committee was unmoved — or, more precisely, uninterested in finding out.
“Specifically, you complained that Roberta Kaplan, attorney for E. Jean Carroll, failed to timely correct allegedly false testimony concerning ‘outside funding of her client’s defamation lawsuits[.]’ You indicated that this matter was brought before and addressed by the court handling this lawsuit,” Dopico’s letter reads. “We have found that a judicial determination of such matters is helpful as this Committee is not the proper forum for re-litigating issues that were previously, or should have been, decided by the court of first review.”
That is the entire substantive analysis, according to Paul Kamenar, the veteran Washington attorney who drafted the complaint for NLPC.
Kamenar’s objection is straightforward: the courts never decided the question the complaint actually raised. “The court only reviewed E. Jean Carroll’s relationship with Reid Hoffman, the funder of her defamation lawsuit, not Ms. Kaplan’s ethical misconduct for waiting almost six months until the eve of the trial to tell the court and Trump’s attorneys that Carroll made a false statement during her deposition that she was not receiving any outside funding; and for deceiving the court with her lame excuse for not coming clean earlier about the funding source,” Kamenar told the Daily Signal.
“Nor did the bar committee address our allegation that Kaplan charged excessive fees by charging Carroll a contingency fee plus receiving outside funding from Hoffman,” he added.
There is textual support for Kamenar’s distinction. When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit examined the funding-disclosure dispute in Trump’s appeal, its analysis focused on what Carroll knew, not on what her lawyer did. “There was no evidence to suggest that Ms. Carroll was personally involved in securing the funding, interacted with the funder, received an invoice showing the arrangement before or after her counsel received the outside funding, or had discussed the arrangement with anyone between learning of it in September 2020 and being deposed in October 2022,” the court wrote. That finding may explain Carroll’s inaccurate answer. It says nothing about whether her attorney — who indisputably did know about the funding — satisfied her own independent duty of candor in the months that followed.
A spokesperson for Kaplan Martin, the firm where Kaplan now practices, referred inquiries to that Second Circuit ruling. Kaplan herself did not respond to the Daily Signal’s requests for comment, and a grievance committee spokesperson likewise did not respond. Hoffman, for his part, has never conceded any impropriety; he told the Washington Post in 2023 that he never tried to keep his funding secret, saying his team believed Carroll’s “voice should be heard because she was challenging someone who was so much wealthier and more powerful.”
The Gatekeeper Problem
Set aside the politics — NLPC is a conservative watchdog, Kaplan is a celebrated progressive litigator, and each side will read this outcome through its preferred lens. The process question remains, and it is not a partisan one.
New York’s grievance committees promise that complaints receive careful review; the First Department’s own public materials describe an investigative process for complaints that raise colorable questions of misconduct. Yet a detailed complaint against one of the most prominent lawyers in America was closed in about a month, at the screening stage, by a single official, with a rationale that — on its face — addressed a question different from the one presented. Whether the complaint would have survived a genuine investigation is unknowable. That is rather the point: no investigation occurred.
NLPC also notes the committee’s uneven history with high-profile respondents. In 2020, the same body rejected NLPC’s complaint against Senator Charles Schumer over his “you will pay the price” remarks aimed at two Supreme Court justices, citing the senator’s First Amendment rights. The same disciplinary system later disbarred Rudy Giuliani for false statements about the 2020 election. Reasonable people can distinguish those cases — Giuliani’s statements were made in court filings and proceedings, where the First Amendment offers little shelter — but the pattern feeds a perception that outcomes track the respondent’s politics. Perceptions like that are corrosive precisely because the discipline system operates in secret and answers to no one when it declines to act.
The complaint’s dismissal also fits a broader national pattern this publication has documented repeatedly: bar discipline is swift and severe for small-firm practitioners who miss escrow deadlines, and strikingly hesitant when the respondent is powerful, connected, or politically sympathetic to regulators. The merits of any single complaint aside, a screening process that can kill a 15-page complaint in two sentences — without ever reaching the full committee — is a process built for discretion, not accountability.
What Happens Next
Kamenar has announced that NLPC will appeal the rejection. The stakes extend beyond one lawyer. Third-party litigation funding is a multibillion-dollar industry that increasingly shapes high-profile American litigation, and the profession’s rules on disclosure, client consent, and fee arrangements were not written with billionaire-backed political causes in mind. Whether a lawyer can sit on knowledge of false deposition testimony about that funding for six months without professional consequence is a question the bar should want to answer in public — whatever the answer turns out to be.
For now, New York’s answer is two sentences long.
The underlying litigation continues: the Supreme Court declined on June 29 to hear Trump’s appeal of Carroll’s $5 million judgment, while his appeal of the separate $83.3 million defamation award remains pending.