(Congress Report) – Former President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against both ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos, claiming they defamed him due to allegations of rape that the host made while conducting an interview with Congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina. The left is obviously getting desperate now that Trump is the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, as he’s on a collision course to face off for the second time against President Joe Biden.
According to The Western Journal, “Stephanopoulos confronted Mace during a March 10 interview on ‘This Week,’ asking how she — a rape victim when a teenager — could endorse the former president when ‘judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape.'”
Mace, a Republican, offered some push back by stating that Stephanopoulos was trying to shame her as a rape victim.
“The rape reference was to a 2023 civil case in which writer E. Jean Carroll won a multimillion-dollar judgment against Trump for sexually abusing her in 1996 and defaming her. Contrary to what Stephanopoulos said, federal Judge Lewis A. Kaplan told the jury members they could find Trump liable for rape, but they declined,” the report continued.
BREAKING: Donald Trump sues ABC News and host George Stephanopoulos for defaming him during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace.
Good 🔥
The lawsuit stems from Stephanopoulos’ questioning of Mace about being a r*pe survivor.
The show host apparently lied about Trump during his… pic.twitter.com/0ojdHHFS7R
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 19, 2024
A later memorandum from Kaplan stated that while it was not technically a rape under the law in New York, alleged evidence presented during the trial shows claims of sexual abuse by the former president did violate the common and other legal violations of rape.
However, he “was never found liable for rape,” Alejandro “Alex” Brito, one of Trump’s legal team members in Miami, went on to say.
Brito asserted that Stephanopoulos’ accusation during the interview “is, from our estimation, a clear defamatory statement.”
“We reached out to ABC and ABC News on Sunday immediately following the news reporting and asked for an apology and a retraction,” the attorney remarked.
“And rather than acknowledge that Stephanopoulos crossed the line and made a mistake and provide us with such a retraction, all ABC did was change the headline of a print of this story,” he added.
Brito commented that he will be using another Stephanopoulos interview, this one with Carroll, that took place after the trial.
During that particular interview, the anchor asked Carroll, “How about yesterday in the courtroom? The first announcement was made, and it was that he was not found liable for rape. What were you thinking at that moment?”
Brito says that Stephanopoulos didn’t use the term by accident, but proclaimed he “knows the facts, yet he chooses to ignore the facts.”
“He said it 10 times in a 10-minute interview and was reading from notes when he asked these questions,” the attorney declared.
Carroll walked away from the trial with a victory and judgment of $5 million. In January, the former president was ordered to pay her a whopping $83.3 million for defamation.
Copyright 2024. CongressReport.com
I’m not a particularly a Trump supporter but I think it’s ridiculous that she was able to collect when she didn’t know exactly when etc, and waited all these years to sue him.she is making it seem that anyone can say something happened with no proof and it’s judged as so. It seems to me that in New York if you are a liberal its the place to be especially against a conservative.
Ann, there is no mechanism to upvote your comments, so I will say I wholeheartedly agree. In my opinion the penalty is that it is arbitrary and capricious. I do not believe a fair trial in NY is possible unless both parties share the same ideology as the magistrate.