ABC News in America has just settled a defamation suit Donald Trump brought against the network. ABC, which is owned by Disney, agreed to pay $US15 million ($24 million) to Trump’s presidential library foundation and pay Trump’s legal costs, supposedly another $US1 million.
In Australia, occasionally, we see settlements like this. But never for anything like $24 million. In the US, it’s very, very unusual. It certainly looks like a crushing victory for Trump in his attempts to cow the media.
Protesters outside the Federal Court in New York in January this year, during E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against him.Credit: Bloomberg
It goes back to a woman who says that, in 1996, Trump accosted her in the changing rooms of an upscale department store in Manhattan. The writer E. Jean Carroll testified – and forgive my bluntness here, but it will have relevance later – that Trump pushed her up against a wall, pawed her and digitally penetrated her.
Several civil cases ensued. I’ll skip over the complications; Carroll won all of them. However, the jury in one found that Trump had sexually assaulted, rather than raped, her. That’s because New York state law at the time defined rape as involving forced penile penetration of the vagina. (Until the state changed the law this year, in the wake of this case, even anal rape was not considered rape in the state.) Indeed, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said bluntly that what Trump did was rape in the common meaning of the term. “The jury found that Mr Trump, in fact, did exactly that,” Kaplan said.
I will pause here and let everyone reflect that the person in question has just been re-elected as US president.
Now let’s fast forward to March this year. One-time Bill Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos, now a prominent host for ABC News, interviewed a combative Trump supporter in Congress. He pressed her repeatedly about how she could support someone who’d been found liable for rape. Trump then sued ABC News for defamation, saying the jury hadn’t found that.
E. Jean Carroll arrives at Manhattan Federal Court in January, less than a year after convincing a jury that Donald Trump sexually abused her decades ago. Credit: Ted Shaffrey/AP
The ABC News settlement was unexpected. The US press, as a rule, doesn’t back down and settle cases like these; that just encourages more of them. American constitutional law makes it tough to punish even inaccurate assertions if the reporters were, in effect, operating in relatively good faith.
The case didn’t involve recklessness or even hyperbole. Rather, it involved plain speaking about a matter of public import. It’s easy to envision Stephanopoulos on the witness stand, making his case in plain language that a jury could understand, “She said he pushed her up against a wall and pushed his fingers into her vagina! That’s not rape? The judge said the jury found he raped her! Wouldn’t the judge know? Am I not allowed to repeat what a judge said?”