The Wild Claim Alina Habba Made About Her Childhood That's Hard To Believe

Alina Habba is no stranger to awkward media moments. While most of them relate to Habba's work as Donald Trump's lawyer, she has also sparked controversy for making some bold claims about her childhood. During the 2024 Young Women's Leadership Summit, she described living off Coca-Cola and peanuts from McDonald's because that was all her father could afford. But many social media users had trouble believing her anecdote for a few different reasons. Her background was the most poignant of all.

Alina is the daughter of Saad Habba, a gastroenterologist and president of the GastroSurgi Center of New Jersey in Mountainside. Saad, who identified the Habba Syndrome in 2000, was trained at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and has been practicing medicine for more than four decades — longer than Alina has been alive. When she was a child in New Jersey in the late '80s, her father was already a doctor. Alina's parents, Chaldean Catholics from Iraq, moved to the U.S. in the early '80s to flee religious persecution.

Leaving one's country amid political turmoil and adjusting to life in a new land is undoubtedly hard, but the Habbas managed to get back on their feet quickly enough to give their children a privileged education. In the late '90s and early '00s, Alina attended the Kent Place School, a private all-girls prep school whose tuition today runs close to $54,000 a year for its high school program. Habba's expensive schooling and her father's professional background make her claims hard to believe. 

On June 8, 2024, Alina Habba gave what was intended to be a moving speech about her humble origins at the Turning Point USA event. "My first home when I was born was across the street from a McDonald's, and my father used to take the money that he could have and got a Coke and a pack of peanuts every day so that we could survive," she said in a clip shared to X, previously Twitter. But not everyone was moved.

Some were confused as to how the fast food chain related to the Habbas' choice of snack. As one X user pointed out, McDonald's isn't known for its peanut products. "Must be a regional thing. Or a fib." Others questioned how the Habbas could have gone from living on soda and peanuts to sending their kids to elite schools in just a few short years. "Her father was a doctor and she went to a high school that cost $50,000 a year but ok," another X user wrote.

Habba doubled down on the veracity of her story despite the online backlash. Days later, she attributed the criticism to a bad case of Trump derangement syndrome on the part of her detractors. "I know that there were comments that were just beyond comprehension, trying to break down, fact-check me. I really can't be fact-checked on my life," she said on "The Charlie Kirk Show" on June 10, 2024 (via Raw Story).

Alina Habba may claim she is a self-made success story, but many netizens believe she is a product of privilege rather than effort. "Her dad's a gastroenterologist. The tuition at her 100+ year old fancy private college prep high school is over $50K per student. And she still ended up in one of the lowest ranked law schools in the country," one user argued on X. Habba studied law at Widener University Commonwealth, which ranked 195 out of 196 on U.S. News' list of best law schools in the country. Habba has also made headlines for legal mistakes.

In January 2024, an attorney rejected one of her claims during Donald Trump's E. Jean Carroll defamation case because Habba seemingly forgot not to bold and italicize passages in the document that went against her argument. Some of her blunders were also called in court. At one point during the trial, the judge called recess when Habba attempted to cite a document before it was put into evidence. "We are going to take a break here and you're going to refresh your memory about how you get a document into evidence," he said (via Newsweek).

Habba's supposed ineptitude has reportedly earned her a reputation among Trump's legal team. "'What the f*** is she doing?' is probably the most common question we asked about her," one of Trump's lawyers told The Daily Beast in 2022. Trump denied the report. "This story is totally untrue," he responded via the Trump Organization.