ABC’s $15 Million Dodge
The settlement is great for Trump, though it falls somewhat short of vindication.
ABC News agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s future presidential library, along with $1 million in Trump’s attorney fees in a defamation settlement over a smear made by the network’s $25 million man, George Stephanopoulos, earlier this year. ABC and Stephanopoulos expressed non-specific “regret” for his sin, and he proceeded to deplatform himself from X.
He didn’t mention the settlement in his Sunday show yesterday, instead focusing on drones in New Jersey. Nevertheless, the settlement was yet more good news for Trump and deliciously lousy news for a contemptible Leftmedia outlet and personality.
Stephanopoulos’s allegation occurred in a March interview with Representative Nancy Mace. She was raped at age 16, so Stephanopoulos demanded to know how, as a rape victim, she could support Trump, who he claimed had been found “liable for rape” in a New York civil case.
Stephanopoulos, you may recall, wasn’t disturbed by working for Bill Clinton, whose serial sexual predation is well-known. Worse, the diminutive political hack was instrumental in trying to destroy the character and reputation of Clinton’s accusers. Defaming them, you might say.
Mace argued that Stephanopoulos was “trying to shame” her with her own rape to score political points. That’s true and despicable, but the real trouble for Stephanopoulos is that his claim wasn’t legally or factually accurate. And he repeated it 10 times in the interview just to make sure viewers at home understood one thing: Trump is a rapist.
That bogus claim is often how rabid leftists “rebut” others on social media, and they believe it because of Leftmedia hacks like Stephanopoulos. He even continued to defend himself in public, telling Trump-deranged “comedian” Stephen Colbert, “Trump sued me because I used the word ‘rape,’ even though a judge said that’s in fact what did happen.”
The Leftmedia spent the last nine years saying a lot of untrue and absurd things about Trump, dividing the country with over-the-top hatred for the man on one side and fueling dedication to him on the other. So, in that sense, $15 million was a bargain for ABC, given the widespread damage to Trump’s reputation.
As the New York Post editorial board put it, “Corporations like ABC and its parent company, Disney, don’t make such payouts unless they think they’re avoiding far worse if the case actually moves ahead.” Indeed, Stephanopoulos and other network officials strategically avoided depositions, indicating they avoided more humiliation by simply settling. They’re not admitting guilt; they’re avoiding discovery.
However.
Trump isn’t exactly as pure as the wind-driven snow, and this settlement is another reminder of that frustrating fact. In May 2023, Trump lost a defamation case brought against him by E. Jean Carroll. A Manhattan jury found Trump liable for more likely than not sexually abusing — distinct from raping — Carroll at a Fifth Avenue department store on an indeterminate date sometime around 1996 and then for defaming her after she finally told her story 23 years later in a 2019 memoir that needed selling. Stephanopoulos is correct in one respect. Judge Lewis Kaplan later tried to have it both ways by saying that even though Carroll didn’t prove rape “within the meaning of the New York Penal Law,” that “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” His statement was a grossly politicized reinterpretation of the jury’s finding.
Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million, after which he said mean things about her again, so she sued again, winning an eye-popping $83 million the second time. Yes, that was ridiculous lawfare against the Bad Orange Man, but if he could just shut his yap once in a while…
For the record, I don’t believe Carroll’s story. At “best,” it’s grossly embellished, and it likely didn’t happen at all. The seed of doubt in my mind is that Trump was famously caught on audio tape bragging about doing almost exactly what Carroll accused him of doing. He claimed that was just locker room talk, and maybe it was. Carroll surely knew about it when she first came forward.
Trump also settled with an adult film star who goes by the name Stormy Daniels for an alleged tryst in 2006. Former Playboy model Karen McDougal likewise claimed an affair with Trump during roughly the same time frame. If so, he cheated on all three of his wives, and that makes what he says about his sex life less than believable, to put it charitably.
As I wrote in 2018, “Conservatives and Christians must deal honestly and forthrightly with the fact that a dishonest and immoral man is the Republican Party’s standard-bearer.” The party and the movement have done this by letting go of the notion that presidents should be of upstanding moral character. Maybe that quaint idea died with Bill Clinton’s Senate acquittal.
None of that excuses what Stephanopoulos or any of the rest of the lying, defaming Leftmedia did. In craven service to the Democrat Party, these propagandists routinely lie about most Republicans — especially Trump. They take a nugget of information and blow it completely out of proportion to the point that it is no longer true. Then, they have the gall to establish “fact-checking” enforcement arms to censor conservative voices for departing from The Narrative.
Chipping away at this Democrat Media Industrial Complex will take time, but $15 million is a good start.
