ABC and George Stephanopoulos settle with Trump for big bucks

 Just another day nad another flat out Lie from the Garbage Media that cost them this time

ABC and George Stephanopoulos have settled the defamation case that Donald Trump filed against them. The settlement is entirely in Trump’s favor. This is a stunning outcome if you know anything about public figures and defamation law.

The lawsuit goes back to E. Jean Carroll’s claim that Donald Trump had raped her in a Bloomingdale’s changing room in the mid-1990s, something she never mentioned to the police. Intriguingly, the allegation’s facts aligned closely with an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Additionally, Carroll vividly remembered wearing an outfit that wasn’t sold then.

Trump vigorously and consistently denied the charges, so Carroll sued him for defamation. She then filed a second suit that also alleged defamation and that added a battery claim under a law that the New York legislature passed for the sole purpose of allowing Carroll to sue Trump. In May 2023, a civil jury expressly rejected any contention that Trump had raped Carroll. However, it did conclude that he had “sexually abused” and defamed Carroll.

Image: YouTube screen grab.

It’s important to note that rape is a very serious criminal charge that should always be subject to the “beyond a reasonable doubt” burden of proof that applies to criminal cases rather than the much lower “more likely than not” burden of proof in civil cases. Those differing burdens of proof matter when you consider that, even under that lighter civil burden of proof, Carroll couldn’t sustain her rape claim. The judge then held that Trump was guilty of defamation.

Ultimately, between the two lawsuits, which meant two defamation claims and one legislative rape claim, Trump was ordered to pay $83.3 million in damages. Trump has appealed those verdicts.

Even though Carroll’s rape claim couldn’t pass muster in a civil case, that didn’t stop George Stephanopoulos, an ABC employee, from claiming that Trump had been “found liable for rape.”

Because of the heinous nature of that assertion, Trump sued.

The fact that Trump did this was unusual. That’s because, in 1964, the Supreme Court decided New York Times v. Sullivan, a case in which a public official had sued the New York Times for defamation.

The Court held that, to protect the media from self-censorship when engaging in political reporting, public officials can only win defamation claims against media outlets if they can prove “that the statement was made with ‘actual malice’—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

The Sullivan standard is so high that public officials really haven’t bothered to file defamation claims since then, no matter how heinous the media’s accusations. That’s why the media have been able to go wild for decades when reporting on Republican politicians.

However, Trump not only sued, but he also forced Stephanopoulos and ABC to settle in a way highly favorable to him:

ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.

According to settlement documents made public Saturday, ABC will also post a note on its website expressing regret over the claim in a March 10 segment on Stephanopoulos’ “This Week” program and pay $1 million in legal fees to Trump’s lawyer.

Looking back over sixty years of post-Sullivan media insults regarding Republican politicians, this is an amazing outcome because it shows that the media are getting worried. They understand that even judges who are crazed, ardent partisans pay attention to which way the cultural and political winds are blowing.

Currently, the mood of the country is pro-Trump and hostile to the left’s wokism and lawfare. In other words, for the Democrats, the party is finally over, and they know it.

We are living in exciting times. It’s entirely possible that the day before the debate between Joe Biden and Trump was the high water mark of the Democrat party, something it had been building to since the 1960s. It had a few setbacks—most notably the Reagan Revolution, which was primarily premised on economics and national security—but never before had it flown its freak flag so high or been so soundly slapped by voters. ABC’s climb-down reflects this reality.

However, the worst thing that conservatives and Republicans can do now is to proclaim victory and go home. If we don’t press our advantage in the cultural and political spheres, we will have lost everything we just gained.

Leftism is down, but it’s not yet out—and, indeed, may never be. Like mildew, no matter how hard you work to defeat it, it always returns. As Reagan said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” Let the vigilance begin today and last forever.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/12/abc_and_george_stephanopoulos_settle_with_trump_for_big_bucks.html