ABC News’ Calculated Surrender to Trump on Stephanopoulos’s Sleaze

My view, extensively explained in March, remains the same: Now-president-elect Trump’s defamation case against George Stephanopoulos — the Democratic Party operative and, if I may be redundant, ABC News anchor — was legally meritless. To make sense of the $16 million settlement ABC News’ parent, Disney, decided to pay Trump (which will hilariously force the “fake news” media to underwrite the yet-to-be-built Trump presidential library), we must conclude that news company was trying to avoid humiliating discovery disclosures and the possibility of losing the jury trial.

Because of extraordinarily burdensome proof standards for defamation lawsuits in the United States, Trump would have had to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that Stephanopoulos’s assertions that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case were knowingly false or made with reckless disregard for the truth. Stephanopoulos’s repeated assertions were knowingly sleazy, but they were within the ballpark of accuracy.

About the Author

Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.

Featured Tags

My view, extensively explained in March, remains the same: Now-president-elect Trump’s defamation case against George Stephanopoulos — the Democratic Party operative and, if I may be redundant, ABC News anchor — was legally meritless. To make sense of the $16 million settlement ABC News’ parent, Disney, decided to pay Trump (which will hilariously force the “fake news” media to underwrite the yet-to-be-built Trump presidential library), we must conclude that news company was trying to avoid humiliating discovery disclosures and the possibility of losing the jury trial.

Because of extraordinarily burdensome proof standards for defamation lawsuits in the United States, Trump would have had to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that Stephanopoulos’s assertions that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case were knowingly false or made with reckless disregard for the truth. Stephanopoulos’s repeated assertions were knowingly sleazy, but they were within the ballpark of accuracy.

About the Author

Andrew C. McCarthy

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.