Former President Donald Trump on Monday sued ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos, accusing them of defaming him during an interview earlier this month with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C.
Stephanopoulos in the interview pressed Mace, a rape survivor, over her support for Trump after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s.
“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,” Stephanopoulos said at one point. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony that we just saw?”
A jury last year found that Trump had sexually abused Carroll but did not find that she proved that he had raped her. But in dismissing Trump’s countersuit, the judge in the case concluded that the claim that Trump raped Carroll was “substantially true,” according to CNN.
“Indeed, the jury’s verdict in Carroll II establishes, as against Mr Trump, the fact that Mr Trump ‘raped her’, albeit digitally rather than with his penis. Thus, it establishes against him the substantial truth of Ms Carroll’s ‘rape’ accusations,” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote.
Trump’s lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Florida, claims Stephanopoulos’s statements were “false, intentional, malicious and designed to cause harm.”
“Hot damn is this an ill-advised lawsuit,” warned Georgia attorney Andrew Fleischman.
“This complaint is completely wacko, like the person who filed it,” tweeted George Conway, a conservative attorney and frequent Trump critic who advised Carroll on the case, adding that the judge “has said that in written opinions at least *three* times.”
Trump’s theory is that since the jury unanimously found that Trump “forcibly and without consent penetrated Carroll’s vagina with his fingers and not his penis, and since this constituted sexual assault and not rape as defined by the New York Penal Code, Stephanopoulos libeled him by saying he had been held liable for ‘rape,’ even though the judge in the Carroll case has held multiple times since the verdict that in common parlance (and the law of most other jurisdictions) forcible digital penetration is rape,” Conway explained.
“In other words, Trump is suing Stephanopoulos and ABC because Stephanopoulos repeated what a federal district judge has said repeatedly in written opinions,” he added. “By bringing this lawsuit, Trump will only bring more public attention to what he did to Carroll. And he and his lawyers may very well be—in fact, ought to be—sanctioned. Another brilliant stable-genius move.”
