The Trump v. ABC Defamation Decision That Led to the $15M Settlement
From the July 24 opinion by Chief Judge Cecilia Altonaga (S.D. Fla.) that led to ABC’s $15M (plus $1M in attorney fees plus an editor’s note) settlement filed today:
On March 10, 2024, Stephanopoulos interviewed United States Representative Nancy Mace; ABC and ABC News broadcast the interview as part of the show This Week with George Stephanopoulos. In the interview, Stephanopoulos asked Mace about her endorsement of Plaintiff despite the fact he was “found liable for rape” [in E. Jean Carroll’s case against him]. He repeated the phrase ten times during the interview, at one point stating “[j]udges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape,” and “[t]he Judge affirmed that it was, in fact, rape.” A screenshot of a newspaper headline stating that “Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll[,]” was shown near the end of the broadcast….
Trump sued, arguing that the jury had found him not guilty of rape but only guilty of sexual abuse; ABC argued that, in context, the jury in Carroll v. Trump must have found him guilty of digital penetration, which is a form of rape or in any event tantamount to rape. But Chief Judge Altonaga disagreed:
“Under the substantial truth doctrine, a statement does not have to be perfectly accurate if the ‘gist’ or the ‘sting’ of the statement is true.” …
[In resolving this question], the Court is mindful of the specific setting in which the statements were made. Here, Stephanopoulos was not describing Plaintiff’s actions or Carroll’s testimony against him; he was describing the jury’s verdict.
This distinguishes several of the cases Defendants cite. In those cases, courts concluded it is substantially true for publications to describe forced sexual contact as rape when reporting on the events themselves. See, e.g., Moore v. Lowe (N.D. Ala. 2022) (concluding that it was substantially true to report that the plaintiff was accused of attempted rape, even if the statement would lead readers to believe he was accused of “forced vaginal sex rather than forced oral sex”); Nanji v. Nat’l Geographic Soc. (D. Md. 2005) (concluding it was not inaccurate to “use [] the term ‘rape’ as shorthand for sexual misconduct” when recounting “the abundance of sexual misconduct evidence in the public records”).
More to the point, Defendants also c
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