Judge Refuses To Dismiss Donald Trump’s Defamation Lawsuit Against ABC News
A federal judge in Florida refused to toss out Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against ABC News over comments that anchor George Stephanopoulos made during a contentious This Week interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC).
Trump sued the network over Stephanopoulos’ contention that “juries have found” the former president “liable for rape.” Last year, a civil jury found that Trump was liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump contended that he was defamed as Stephanopoulos did not make the distinction.
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U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga wrote that she “does not find that a reasonable jury must — or even is likely to — conclude Stephanopoulos’s statements were defamatory. A jury may, upon viewing the segment, find there was sufficient context. A jury may also conclude Plaintiff fails to establish other elements of his claim. But a reasonable jury could conclude Plaintiff was defamed and, as a result, dismissal is inappropriate.”
In their motion to dismiss, ABC’s attorneys pointed to what the judge in the E. Jean Carroll case, Lewis Kaplan, wrote in a later ruling. “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.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that,” Kaplan wrote.
In a separate phase of the Carroll case this year, a jury awarded her an additional $83.3 million in damages. That followed another jury’s award of $5 million in damages to her in the initial phase of the case. Trump has denied Carroll’s claims and is appealing the verdicts.
During the interview, Stephanopoulos played a video in which Mace said that she was a victim of rape. Stephanopoulos first asked Mace, “You endorsed Donald Trump for president. Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony that we just saw?”
Mace said to Stephanopoulos, “I’ve lived for 30 years with an incredible amount of shame over being raped. I didn’t come forward because of that judgment and shame that I felt. And it is a shame that you will never feel, George. And I am not going to sit here on your show and be asked a question meant to shame me about another potential rape victim.”
Stephanopoulos continued to question Mace on the point, while denying that he was attempting to shame her.
Mace said that Trump “defended himself over that and denies that it ever happened, but he was not found guilty in a criminal court of law.”
Altonaga’s ruling was not on the merits of the case, but that Trump’s lawsuit had met the threshold to move forward.
In her ruling, Altonaga wrote that “Stephanopoulos’s exchange with Mace lasted about ten minutes, during which Stephanopoulos stated ten times that a jury — or juries — had found Plaintiff liable for rape.” The judge wrote that the “jury did not find [Trump] liable for rape under New York Penal Law; it was Judge Kaplan who determined that the jury’s verdict amounted to liability for rape. Yet, none of these particularities make it into the segment such that a reasonable viewer would have indisputably understood what [ABC News] now brief in detail.”
The judge also rejected the network’s defense that it was protected under Florida’s fair reporting privilege, writing that it does “not protect media where the omission of important context renders a report misleading.”
ABC had no immediate comment.
On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump called the ruling a “big win” and a “great day for our country.”
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