In May 2023, a jury found Donald Trump guilty of sexually assaulting kooky newspaper columnist E. Jean Carroll. It did not find him guilty of rape.
But that didn’t matter to ABC talker George Stephanopolous, who in March, during an interview with hard-as-nails conservative U.S. Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, said a jury found Trump liable for the latter.
Though Carroll got away with the same false claim, the former Clinton legman didn’t.
The defamation has cost far-left ABC $15 million, which it will pay to help set up the Trump presidential library.
The Smear
The foundation of Stephanopolous’ defamation were the federal lawsuits that Carroll filed against Trump for rape. Trump supposedly cornered Carroll in a changing room in the ritzy Bergdorf Goodman store in New York in 1996. There, she said, Trump raped her.
In the first case, the jury disagreed, and instead awarded Carroll $5 million in damages for sexual assault and that he defamed her when he called her allegations a hoax.
In the second a second jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million because Trump ridiculed her.
The allegations about the department store rape sounded suspiciously like an episode from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
In March, during an interview with Mace, Stephanopolous enhanced the jury’s decision in the original case.
Stephanopolous inappropriately asked how Mace, as a rape victim, could endorse Trump for president.
The broadcast began with video of Mace telling her story on the House floor. That segued into Stephanopoulos’ shocking question.
“You’ve endorsed Donald Trump for president,” the former Cilnton mouthpiece said:
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 we just saw.
Explaining her own experience and the shame she felt, she told Stephanopolous that his questions were “meant to shame me about another potential rape victim.”
Replied Stephanopoulos:
“It’s actually not about shaming you. It’s a question about Donald Trump. You’ve endorsed Donald Trump for president. Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury. Donald Trump has been found liable for defaming the victim of that rape by a jury. It’s been affirmed by a judge.
Trump sued over the defamation, and on Friday, ABC has settled. The settlement included a statement that ABC appended to the defamatory story on its website: “Editor’s Note: ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”
For her part, as The New American reported in 2019, Carroll had twice said that what supposedly occurred in the dressing room was not a rape. She told The New York Times it was a “fight.”
“I was not thrown on the ground and ravaged,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “The word rape carries so many sexual connotations. This was not sexual. It just hurt.”
Pay Up, ABC
The settlement, The Associated Press reported, is a charitable contribution to construct Trump’s presidential library.
Total hit for the far-left network $15 million.
Trump sued misandrist Carroll for her claim that he raped her, but that lawsuit was dismissed. The judge, Lewis Kaplan, said Trump’s claim was meritless. Kaplan oversaw the other two cases.
Fox News helpfully assembled far-left commentary about the settlement.
I do worry about the effect this could have on others and the chilling effect it might have on people who otherwise would be critical of Donald Trump,” said MSNBC legal analyst on Saturday.
Said Harry Litman, a legal columnist for the Los Angeles Times, “given the timing, he is on a roll and a roll, that is really unsettling in terms of public confidence in the criminal justice system and media confidence, and who is left after the media to tell the truth, that he will come after them, make their lives miserable, and it has been successful so far.”
On BlueSky, USA Today columnist Michael J. Stern said, without saying it, that Stephanopolous did nothing wrong:
First the LA Times, then the Washington Post, and now ABC News. They are all falling to Donald Trump.
When George Stephanopoulos said Trump “raped” E. Jean Carroll, he was using the word colloquially. Trump was found liable of sexually assaulting her.
The references to the Times and the Post must concern their refusal to endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential election.
Justin Baragona of the Daily Beast is equally worried.
“ABC agrees to give Trump’s presidential library $15 million, his lawyers a million bucks, and add a statement of regret to settle a defamation suit over George Stephanopoulos saying Trump was liable for rape rather than sexual abuse,” he wrote on the leftist imitation of X. “This sets a worrisome precedent.”
“Knee bent. Ring kissed,” Democrat elections lawyer Marc Elias wrote on X. “Another legacy news outlet chooses obedience.”
Question is, will Trump go after anyone else who called him a rapist?
The Catturd X feed reposted far-left commentator Brian Krassenstein’s claim that Trump is a rapist. “I expect your judgement to be way more than 15 million since you said it way more times than ABC,” Catturd wrote. The X feed also reposted TikTok “influencer” Harry Sisson’s identical false claim.
