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“ABC News has agreed to pay [$15 million] to US President-elect Donald Trump to settle a defamation lawsuit after its star anchor falsely said he had been found ‘liable for rape’. George Stephanopoulos made the statements repeatedly during an interview on 10 March this year while challenging a congresswoman about her support for Trump… ABC also published an editor's note expressing its ‘regret’ for the statements by Stephanopoulos…
“In 2023, a New York civil court found Trump sexually abused E Jean Carroll in a dressing room at a department store in 1996. He was also found guilty of defaming the magazine columnist. Judge Lewis Kaplan said the jury's conclusion was that Ms Carroll had failed to prove that Trump raped her ‘within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law’. Judge Kaplan noted that the definition of rape was ‘far narrower’ than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries and in criminal statutes elsewhere.” BBC
The left is critical of the settlement, arguing that Stephanopoulos’s statements were defensible.
“Stephanopoulos’s comments were consistent with how the presiding judge described the case. Under New York’s criminal laws, rape requires forced penile presentation. However, the judge in that case explicitly stated that ‘the finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’…
“Given that the ABC lawsuit seemed like an easy win for the network, the settlement feels like something designed to curry favor with Trump as he enters office. Debra O’Connell, who oversees ABC News, already had dinner with Trump’s new chief of staff. Put it all together and it’s hard to have confidence in the network’s commitment to hard-hitting coverage of his second administration.”
Lisa Needham, Public Notice
“ABC News does its business under the world-class protections of the First Amendment. One of those protections is articulated in the Supreme Court case Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, which noted that libel law in this country ‘overlooks minor inaccuracies and concentrates upon substantial truth.’…
“Accompanying the luxury of those protections is the obligation to actually use them. As opposed to bailing on a winnable case from a man with a history of exploiting the civil justice system.”
Erik Wemple, Washington Post
“It’s particularly notable that this is happening in the case of news organizations whose owners have other businesses. So that would be true of the LA Times, The Washington Post, and also ABC, which is owned by Disney. [They] have lots of interests with the federal government; they have regulatory issues. And it looks like they’re making concessions in advance so that they don’t run into trouble down the line…
“There is a danger that large media, especially when owned by someone who has other conflicts of interests, could become intimidated and could begin to tell its reporters to be careful what they say…
“The real danger isn’t censorship. It’s not like there’s going to be a censor who’s going to come on TV and say, You can’t say that. The danger is that people start to self-censor. People start being careful about what they say. They think about the consequences, about the frivolous lawsuits that might come if they say something that could conceivably offend the president. That’s the world we’re entering.”
Anne Applebaum, New Republic
The right applauds the settlement, arguing that Stephanopoulos repeatedly made false statements.
The right applauds the settlement, arguing that Stephanopoulos repeatedly made false statements.
“Stephanopoulos got the nature of the verdict wildly and recklessly wrong, over and over again — aggressively so. The Manhattan jury that found Trump liable for an indeterminate sexual offense pointedly stipulated that Carroll didn’t prove rape…
“That they reached that verdict in a civil trial, where the incredibly permissive ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard is used (as opposed to the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ one), is evidence enough how even the least favorable jury imaginable for Donald Trump found Carroll’s claim of rape unpersuasive…
“The fickle gods of irony must have been displeased and delighted in equal measure to see this sort of legally actionable ignorance from a man who used to gleefully destroy the names and reputations of his boss’s paramours (willing or otherwise) and who somehow managed to spin that gig into his present job.”
Jeffrey Blehar, National Review
“The jury, acting on Kaplan’s instructions, specifically found that Carroll did not prove that Trump raped her. The jury decided the case. Whatever Kaplan said in a motion afterward did not change the jury’s verdict…
“ABC and George Stephanopoulos are paying a price for falsely characterizing the trial’s result. Stephanopoulos, who before his move into the news business was an aggressively partisan Democratic operative, seemed determined to declare, over and over, that Trump had been found liable for rape. That simply was not true, and ABC decided it wasn’t worth it to try to defend Stephanopoulos’s falsehoods in court.”
Byron York, Washington Examiner
“Disney does not pay off defamation claims simply because their subsidiaries provided ‘critical coverage’ of politicians, one can rest assured, especially when $1 million of that went to Trump's lawyers. They have a large [number] of attorneys on staff and plenty of resources to hire the best outside counsel possible to defend themselves…
“If Disney OK'd a $16 million settlement that includes a public statement of ‘regret,’ those attorneys must have assured them that they would lose a lot more than that if the case went to trial. And the settlement notably came just before the discovery phase and the depositions of George Stephanopoulos and others involved in the March 2024 broadcast.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
