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On Saturday it was announced that ABC News and its parent company Disney had reached a dubious settlement of a defamation lawsuit brought by President-elect Donald Trump, capping off an extraordinary stretch of capitulation by major players in old and new media since October. These media giants recognize all too well what we document in the latest edition of our American Autocracy Threat Tracker: Yes, the press and the companies that own them are at risk at the hands of the incoming Trump administration. The preservation of our democracy, however, will require much more fight than old-media entities like ABC News have so far exhibited.
In March, Trump sued ABC, ABC News, and host George Stephanopoulos for comments he made during a March 10 interview with South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace in which Stephanopoulos said that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The comment was in reference to a May 2023 verdict in which a jury found Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $2 million in damages. Another one of Carroll’s civil claims alleged that Trump “raped” her according to New York law, but the jury did not find for her on that claim.
In the months following the verdict, Trump’s lawyers trumpeted that the jury had rejected the rape claim and asked the judge for a new trial. Denying Trump’s request, presiding federal Judge Lewis Kaplan explained—describing in detail the lewd evidence and the applicable law—that the definition of rape under New York penal law is “far narrower” than in “common modern parlance” and other criminal statutes. According to the judge’s written opinion, “the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly” what “many people commonly understand [by] the word ‘rape.’ ”
Given those facts, Trump’s lawsuit against ABC was likely to meet the same fate as his other, prior defamation actions against the media: failure (based on the public record). Not only were Stephanopoulos’ comments........