A Florida judge has rejected ABC News’ motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed by former President Donald Trump.
Attorneys for Trump filed the initial complaint against the network earlier this year, with claims centering on a series of statements made by anchor George Stephanopoulos in a March 10 airing of “This Week.” During the segment, which featured conservative Rep. Nancy Mace as a guest, Stephanopoulos said that a New York found that Trump had “raped” long-time Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll.
“You’ve endorsed Donald Trump for president,” Stephanopoulos told Mace. “Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape.”
Stephanopoulos, notes The New York Times, repeatedly similar claims nearly a dozen times throughout the segment.
The former president’s lawsuit contends that Stephanopoulos misrepresented the outcome of Carroll’s case: while jury held Trump liable for battery arising from sexual abuse, it rejected more explicit allegations of rape for lack of sufficient evidence.
Although Stephanopoulos’s comments were not accurate with respect to the jury’s conclusion, defamation claims involving public figures typically require that the plaintiff establish elements of actual malice—meaning that a false or contested statement is defamatory only if its source knew that the statement was false, or made no effort to verify the veracity of a statement they had good reason to believe could be false.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who presided over the Carroll trial, later clarified that an assertion of Trump having committed rape is “substantially true” when considering common usages of the word “rape,” even if the term has a different meaning under New York law.
However, in rejecting ABC News’s motion to dismiss, a Florida-based federal judge suggested that Stephanopoulos’s remarks may not fall into the same category of general discourse identified by Kaplan.
“New York has opted to separate out a crime of rape,” U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga wrote in her Wednesday decision. “Stephanopoulos’s statements dealt not with the public’s usage of that term, but the jury’s consideration of it during a formal legal proceeding.”
Altonaga noted that Trump’s claims, and ABC’s potential defense, could hinge on “whether it is substantially true to say a jury (or juries) found (Trump) liable for rape by a jury despite the jury’s verdict expressly finding he was not liable for rape.”
“Judge Kaplan,” Altonaga added, “was reviewing a jury’s damages award” when determining if the term “rape” could be used to describe Trump’s actions. Kaplan’s “analysis necessarily focused on what Carroll had and had not proved at trial, as well as the harm that Carroll experienced from (Trump’s) abuse.”
“There was no discussion of how to accurately report on the jury’s findings,” Altonaga said.
Sources
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