A federal judge in Miami has denied a motion to dismiss Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the ABC News TV network and one of its star journalists, George Stephanopoulos, concerning remarks made by the anchor in March that the former president had been “found liable for rape”.
In a 21-page ruling issued on Wednesday, the judge, Cecilia Altonaga of the US district court for the southern district of Florida, rejected arguments brought by the news division and its host. She said that a “reasonable jury” could conclude that Trump had been defamed, and, as a result, “dismissal is inappropriate”.
The decision allows the case to proceed to the discovery phase and possible trial.
Trump heralded the ruling as a “big win”. In a post on his Truth Social platform, he repeated his offensive moniker for the TV host as “LIDDLE GEORGE SLOPADOPOLUS” and said the judgment would force the “fake news media” to tell the truth.
The anchor made his contested comment in an interview broadcast on ABC’s Sunday news program, This Week With George Stephanopoulos, on 10 March this year. In it, he asked Nancy Mace, the Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, why she had endorsed Trump’s presidential run even though he had been “found liable for rape”.
Trump lodged his defamation lawsuit nine days later.
The disputed remark concerned the civil cases that had been brought against Trump in New York by the writer and former Elle magazine advice columnist E Jean Carroll. In 2019, she accused Trump, who was then in the White House, of sexually assaulting and raping her in an encounter in the 1990s.
Trump denied the allegations and made critical comments about Carroll, which she then challenged in a defamation lawsuit against him. She also issued a separate lawsuit seeking damages for sexual assault.
In the sexual assault case, a jury found in May last year in New York that Trump had “sexually abused” her but not that he had “raped” her. Under New York law, rape is defined as penile penetration whereas the jury found that he had digitally penetrated her.
In a later legal challenge, the federal judge presiding over the Carroll sexual assault case, Lewis Kaplan, concluded that the jury’s finding that she had failed to prove Trump had raped her under New York’s definition did not mean she failed to prove “rape” as many people understood it. He said the jury’s verdict had established that Trump “raped” Carroll, “albeit digitally rather than with his penis”.
ABC News and Stephanopoulos drew on Kaplan’s comments to argue that Trump’s claims in his defamation case against them had already been litigated, and that Stephanopoulos’s comments were “substantially true”. They also argued that they were protected from legal action for libel by Florida’s fair reporting privilege, which gives news outlets qualified protection when they report accurately on information received from government officials. Trump changed his residency status to Florida after leaving office in 2021, living in his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach.
In her ruling allowing the case to go forward, Altonaga stressed that she was not commenting either way on the merits of Trump’s defamation case. But she rejected all three of the arguments pressed by the defendants.
