Donald Trump, ABC News, and the toxic legacy of the E. Jean Carroll case

Trump has filed or threatened to file a lot of lawsuits over alleged defamatory coverage. But he hasn’t won one, hasn’t even come close to winning one. Now he has.

The development particularly shocked Trump’s most determined adversaries. He’s not supposed to win a case like this! The media have a right to say virtually anything they want about the former president and current president-elect and not have to worry about Trump having some legal recourse to fight back. That, at least, was their implicit assumption.

At issue was the March 10, 2024, edition of ABC’s This Week in which Stephanopoulos interviewed Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), a strong Trump supporter. Mace had recently revealed she had been raped at age 16. She wanted fellow victims to be able to discuss such things without shame. At that, Stephanopoulos pounced. “You endorsed Donald Trump for president,” he told Mace. “Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming a victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with [that]?”

When Mace pushed back, Stephanopoulos repeated the charge over and over. “Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury,” he said. A few moments later, he said, “I’m asking you a question about why you endorsed someone who’s been found liable for rape.” Later, he said, “You’re supporting someone who’s been found liable for rape.” And still later, he said, “Why are you supporting someone who’s been found liable for rape?” And then: “You don’t find it offensive that Donald Trump has been found liable for rape?” And then: “What you’re doing is defending a man who’s been found liable for rape. I don’t understand how you can do that.” And then: “Donald Trump was found to have committed rape. That’s just a fact.” And then: “You’ve made it very clear you’re comfortable with Donald Trump being found liable for rape.”

To call it overkill would be an understatement. The only problem with Stephanopoulos’s harangue was this: His questions were based on a falsehood. Trump had not been found liable for rape. When the jury in the E. Jean Carroll civil case reached a verdict, it filled out a verdict form. The first question was, “Did Ms. Carroll prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll?” The jury answered, “No.” 

Instead, the jury found that Trump “sexually abused” Carroll — a lower-level offense. You’d think that would be enough for Resistance types. They can accurately say Trump was found liable for sexually abusing Carroll. But no — they wanted to call it rape. 

Nine days after the ABC interview, Trump filed suit for defamation against ABC and Stephanopoulos. Now, nine months later, ABC has agreed to settle by paying Trump $16 million.

The decision set off explosions in the Democratic-media world. The settlement showed ABC, and by inference, the larger media establishment, bowing down to the autocrat Trump. Where was the courage of an independent press? “Knee bent. Ring kissed. Another legacy news outlet chooses obedience,” Democratic lawfare warrior (and Steele dossier hoaxer) Marc Elias posted. “Wow — feels like one more mainstream news organization bending the knee,” NPR media critic Eric Deggans said. “This is both confusing and disheartening. Disney and ABC caving to Trump,” said former Washington Post reporter Sharon Waxman, who is now editor of TheWrap.

The anti-Trump forces felt ABC could have won because media outlets usually win defamation cases against public figures, who, under the law, have fewer protections against defamation than ordinary citizens. They especially pinned their hopes on something the judge in the Carroll case, Lewis Kaplan, had written a few months after the verdict. And that is worth a brief explanation.

After Trump lost the case, he filed a motion for a new trial. Kaplan denied it and, in his denial, attempted to redefine what had taken place in the trial. In this way: Remember that the jury specifically found that Carroll did not prove that Trump raped her, even by the low standards in effect at the trial. But even then, Resistance types — their number may or may not have included the judge himself — desperately wanted to declare Trump a “rapist,” even though the jury had ruled otherwise. 

Kaplan used his denial of the motion for a new trial to express his opinion that the jury had, in fact, found Trump liable for rape. How to do that, given the clarity and specificity of the jury’s decision? Kaplan cast far and wide for definitions of rape that fit his purposes. He argued that the jury had “implicitly” found that Trump raped Carroll if one judges the question by: 1) the definition of rape in Dictionary.com, 2) the definition of rape in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 3) the definition of rape accepted by the American Psychological Association, and 4) the definition of rape used in federal crime reporting statistics. Unfortunately for Kaplan, none of those standards was in effect in New York law, under which the case was brought and tried.

Nevertheless, Kaplan concluded, “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.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump did exactly that.”

For Resistance warriors, and their allies in the media, that was the money quote. See? Trump raped E. Jean Carroll! Judge Kaplan says Dictionary.com says so! 

It was a stunning declaration. One more time: When the verdict form asked, “Did Ms. Carroll prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll?” the jury answered, “No.” How can one be clearer than that? Plus, the jury reached its conclusion by following Kaplan’s own instructions. And then, after the verdict, the judge tried to upend the whole thing.

Given that the case was over, the verdict months in the past, Kaplan’s statement did not receive a huge amount of media attention. But a quasi-opinion writer at the Washington Post published an “analysis” with the headline, “Judge clarifies: Yes, Trump was found to have raped E. Jean Carroll.” And that was enough for the anti-Trump world. Look around today, and almost all of them cite the Washington Post article as proof that Trump raped Carroll.

One of the believers, apparently, was George Stephanopoulos of ABC News. And now that ABC and Stephanopoulos have settled a defamation suit by agreeing to pay $16 million, you’re seeing a lot of anti-Trump types claim that Stephanopoulos was right when he repeatedly said on ABC that Trump had been found liable for rape. Just look at what Kaplan said and read the Washington Post article, they argue.

But the facts remain the facts. The jury, acting on Kaplan’s instructions, specifically found that Carroll did not prove that Trump raped her. The jury decided the case. Whatever Kaplan said in a motion afterward did not change the jury’s verdict. Yes, the judge did a great favor to the Resistance world by lending his name and authority to one of the anti-Trump Left’s favorite talking points. But the jury’s decision stands.

And that might have been the reason ABC executives settled the case. Not because they wanted to bend the knee or kiss Trump’s ring but because they worried they would lose the case. In his interview with Mace, Stephanopoulos falsely characterized the trial’s outcome — over and over and over. Trump had a powerful case. So ABC settled.

One last thing. It’s important to remember the fundamental fact of the Carroll case, and that is that it should have never been brought. This newsletter has written at length about this, but the short version is: Carroll, now 81, cannot remember when the alleged episode took place — she has said it might have been 1995 or might have been 1996. Carroll says she told two friends about it at the time, and those two friends confirmed that at the trial. But Carroll did not go to authorities or tell another soul until 2019. Five years passed, then 10, then 15, then 20, and then nearly 25, and Carroll never told anyone else about it.

Even when Trump became a presidential candidate in 2016 and then won the presidency, and many women accused him of some sort of sexual misconduct, Carroll remained silent. Then, in 2019, Carroll decided to reveal her secret as part of the promotion of a new book. She also conducted paid walking tours of the area around Bergdorf Goodman, the Manhattan store where she said the attack occurred. An excerpt of her book was given star coverage in New York magazine. Carroll quickly became a darling of the Resistance. 

Trump denied the accusation. He said he had “never met this person [Carroll] in my life.” He said she was “trying to sell a book — that should indicate her motivation.” And then he said of Carroll, “Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?”

Remember that in the previous 20-plus years, the statute of limitations on charging Trump with rape or on suing him in some way had long passed. But in 2022, in the late #MeToo era, the New York legislature passed something called the Adult Survivors Act, which allowed people who said they were victims of sexual assault to sue their alleged assailants regardless of when the alleged attack occurred — even if the statute of limitations was long over. The new law was limited in one way: It gave victims just one year to do it, a feature that was called a “one-year lookback.”

Around this time, Carroll went to a cocktail party at the Manhattan home of a prominent Resistance figure, the writer Molly Jong-Fast. The party was in honor of another Resistance figure, the comedian Kathy Griffin. Among those in attendance was still another Resistance figure, the lawyer George Conway. The gathering was, in the words of a New York Times account, “Resistance Twitter come to life.”

Conway reportedly persuaded Carroll that she could sue Trump for defamation. The idea was that when Trump denied having met her, and then said she was making up the rape accusation to sell a book, and then said she, Carroll, was not his type — that was all defamation. Carroll could sue Trump for that, and then, of course, the case would focus on whether the alleged rape actually occurred, so it would be like having a rape trial for Trump even though the statute of limitations was long passed. Yet another Resistance figure, the billionaire Reid Hoffman, agreed to bankroll the effort.

And so the trial began. Under Kaplan’s guidance — he did things that would not normally be allowed in a trial, such as allowing the testimony of other women who claimed Trump had inappropriately touched them — Carroll won a huge $83 million defamation judgment. But even in that context, the jury specifically ruled that Carroll did not prove that Trump raped her.

Of course, nothing could really be proved in the case. It was murky, with allegations far too old to prove, with basic facts impossible to establish after the passage of decades. It was pushed forward by a group of politically motivated Resistance figures who have been trying to defeat Trump in any way they can. Carroll, the elderly plaintiff, sometimes seemed swept up by the energy they created. It was a case that should never have been brought.

But it was brought, and now ABC and George Stephanopoulos are paying a price for falsely characterizing the trial’s result. Stephanopoulos, who before his move into the news business was an aggressively partisan Democratic operative, seemed determined to declare, over and over, that Trump had been found liable for rape. That simply was not true, and ABC decided it wasn’t worth it to try to defend Stephanopoulos’s falsehoods in court.