ABC’s $15m settlement in Trump ‘rape’ defamation case was met with surprise and outrage. Here’s why
ABC’s $15 million settlement with Donald Trump following the president-elect’s defamation lawsuit has alarmed legal analysts and drawn criticism that the network and its Disney parent company gave up without a fight.
“Knee bent. Ring kissed,” prominent Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias wrote. “Another legacy news outlet chooses obedience.”
Former Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi called the settlement an “awful precedent” and a “huge sellout.”
“I’m old enough to remember — and to have worked on — cases where newspapers vigorously defended themselves against defamation cases instead of folding before the defendant was even deposed,” wrote former federal prosecutor and MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance.
On Saturday, it was announced that ABC and host George Stephanopoulos agreed to settle the claims at the center of Trump’s lawsuit against the network and one of its star anchors, who was sued for stating that Trump was found “liable for rape by a jury.”
The $15 million settlement goes towards Trump’s presidential library.
Stephanopoulos mischaracterized the jury’s precise findings in a long-running legal battle involving allegations that Trump sexually assaulted a woman in a department store in New York in the 1990s, and then defamed her by saying she was lying about it.
His comments appeared to summarize what a federal judge overseeing those cases explained to the former president last year, but the judge handling Trump’s lawsuit disagreed that Stephanopoulos’s statements were “substantially” true — teeing up what would become a protracted legal battle if it went to trial.
E Jean Carroll has contended that Trump assaulted her in a dressing room “where, among other things, he forcibly penetrated her vagina with his fingers,” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote last year in the New York case
Under New York criminal law, “rape” involves vaginal penetration by a penis. Trump was ultimately found liable for penetrating Carroll with his hand.
Kaplan said the distinction in this case is largely a semantic one.
A jury’s unanimous verdict “was almost entirely” in her favor, but of “the only point on which Ms. Carroll did not prevail was whether she had proved that Mr. Trump had ‘raped’ her within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law,” Kaplan added.
That section of law defines “rape” as used in criminal prosecutions “only to vaginal penetration by a penis,” while the “forcible, unconsented-to penetration of the vagina or of other bodily orifices by fingers, other body parts, or other articles or materials” is instead labelled “sexual abuse,” the judge noted.
“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,’” he wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial … makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
