(Headline USA) Former President Donald Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News and George Stephanopoulos this week after the host claimed on air that Trump had been found “liable for rape,” The Hill reported.
Stephanopoulos made the false claim during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., when he asked her why she, as a past victim of sexual assault, supported Trump.
When Mace pushed back on his framing, Stephanopoulos insisted at least 10 times that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a civil lawsuit filed by author E. Jean Carroll.
“Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony we just saw?” he said to Mace.
The case against Trump resulted in a jury decision that Trump was liable for sexual assault and defamation, but not for rape. Trump has still denied any wrongdoing in regards to Carroll’s accusations.
The sexual assault charge involves any form of unwanted contact, not necessarily sexual penetration.
Despite every card in the deck being stacked against Trump receiving a fair trial, a Manhattan jury specifically found, following Carroll’s erratic and patchy testimony, that evidence did not meet the standard, even for a civil trial, to prove that Trump had raped the serial accuser in a store dressing room more than 30 years prior.
In the newly filed suit against ABC News, Trump’s lawyers accused Stephanopoulos of repeatedly making “false” and defamatory claims about Trump with “actual malice or with a reckless disregard for the truth, given that Defendant Stephanopoulos knows these statements are patently and demonstrably false.”
The lawsuit notes that Trump’s team reached out to ABC News to request a retraction after the interview between Stephanopoulos and Mace aired, but the network refused to apologize or correct the record.
“Since making such false, malicious, and defamatory statements, many news and press outlets have continued to quote Stephanopoulos by wrongfully broadcasting that Plaintiff was found liable for rape,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
ABC News did not comment on the lawsuit but stood by Stephanopoulos’s comments in a statement last week.
“George did his job by asking meaningful questions that are relevant to our viewers,” an ABC News spokesperson said prior to the lawsuit being filed.
