ABC’s $15 million settlement with Donald Trump following the president-elect’s defamation lawsuit has alarmed legal analysts and drawn criticism that the network and its Disney parent company gave up without a fight.
“Knee bent. Ring kissed,” prominent Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias wrote. “Another legacy news outlet chooses obedience.”
Former Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi called the settlement an “awful precedent” and a “huge sellout.”
“I’m old enough to remember — and to have worked on — cases where newspapers vigorously defended themselves against defamation cases instead of folding before the defendant was even deposed,” wrote former federal prosecutor and MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance.
On Saturday, it was announced that ABC and host George Stephanopoulos agreed to settle the claims at the center of Trump’s lawsuit against the network and one of its star anchors, who was sued for stating that Trump was found “liable for rape by a jury.”
The $15 million settlement goes towards Trump’s presidential library.
Stephanopoulos mischaracterized the jury’s precise findings in a long-running legal battle involving allegations that Trump sexually assaulted a woman in a department store in New York in the 1990s, and then defamed her by saying she was lying about it.
His comments appeared to summarize what a federal judge overseeing those cases explained to the former president last year, but the judge handling Trump’s lawsuit disagreed that Stephanopoulos’s statements were “substantially” true — teeing up what would become a protracted legal battle if it went to trial.
What the judge said in E Jean Carroll’s case
E Jean Carroll has contended that Trump assaulted her in a dressing room “where, among other things, he forcibly penetrated her vagina with his fingers,” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote last year in the New York case
Under New York criminal law, “rape” involves vaginal penetration by a penis. Trump was ultimately found liable for penetrating Carroll with his hand.
Kaplan said the distinction in this case is largely a semantic one.
A jury’s unanimous verdict “was almost entirely” in her favor, but of “the only point on which Ms. Carroll did not prevail was whether she had proved that Mr. Trump had ‘raped’ her within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law,” Kaplan added.
That section of law defines “rape” as used in criminal prosecutions “only to vaginal penetration by a penis,” while the “forcible, unconsented-to penetration of the vagina or of other bodily orifices by fingers, other body parts, or other articles or materials” is instead labelled “sexual abuse,” the judge noted.
“The finding that Ms.Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” he wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial … makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
The jury “implicitly found” that Trump “deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” according to Kaplan.
Judge overseeing Trump’s lawsuit rejected ABC’s key argument
Earlier this year, the federal judge overseeing Trump’s lawsuit against the network rejected ABC’s arguments that the statements were “substantially” true and thus protected under Florida’s so-called “fair report privilege.”
She said she was “not persuaded that such broad latitude exists” in Florida, where the suit was filed.
Florida law absolves media outlets from being “technically precise” in their descriptions of legal issues, but “the privilege does not protect media where the omission of important context renders a report misleading,” the judge wrote.
She argued that a “reasonable viewer” who watched the ABC News segment “could have been misled by Stephanopoulos’s statements, which did not include the jury’s original findings and only fleetingly referenced the interpretation Judge Kaplan later offered.”
“Judge Kaplan’s findings do not have preclusive effect here,” she added.
To win the lawsuit, Trump would have had to prove that ABC was reckless when it came to the truth or falsity of the statements Stephanopoulos made, Vance explained.
“That would be a tough bar for Trump to reach in this case because of the kinds of statements that were made and the outcome of the E. Jean Carroll defamation case against Trump,” she said.
Judge Kaplan’s lengthy filing could have been “powerful evidence” to combat Trump’s defamation claims, according to Vance.
Settlement avoids potentially damaging evidence process
Media analysts have suggested that a payout pre-empted potentially embarassing emails and messages that would have been leaked out during the pre-trial evidence process
That information could have made “ABC look bad or would be advantageous to Trump’s lawyers in other ways,” according to CNN’s Brian Stelter.
He referenced the pre-trial discovery process in Dominion Voting Systems’s lawsuit against Fox News, which revealed damning messages among top Fox personalities and leadership as the network amplified bogus conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election.
Fox eventually settled, resulting in the largest-ever settlement of its kind, to the tune of $787 million.
“Settling seals the case and lets ABC (and parent company Disney) move on,” Stelter said.