OLD AND BUSTED: Build That Wall.
The New Hotness? Build that presidential library! Watch CNN, MSNBC Repeatedly Air The Same Defamatory Phrase That Cost ABC $15 Million.
ABC News agreed to fork over $15 million for falsely claiming that President Donald Trump had been found “liable for rape” of E. Jean Carroll, it was revealed in a settlement agreement publicized on Saturday.
“Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury. Donald Trump has been found liable for defaming the victim of that rape by a jury,” ABC host George Stephanopoulos falsely claimed in an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace in March. He was referring to a case in which writer E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, made loads of money selling a book about it, and then sued Trump for defamation when he insisted on his innocence.
In the civil lawsuit, for which the standard of proof is “more likely than not,” the jurors explicitly found that Trump had not raped Carroll but punished him for “sexual abuse.” Carroll herself has publicly declined to use the word “rape,” and told The Hollywood Reporter that it would be “disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock” to press rape charges against Trump.
Stephanopoulos had no such reservations about the term, and ABC is paying a pretty penny to the Trump presidential library for it. But he’s not the only one who used the defamatory phrase on-air. Here are three times CNN hosts and guests aired the same phrase, and five times it happened on MSNBC.
As Jeffrey Blehar wrote at NRO yesterday:
As God is my witness: I didn’t even know ABC was being sued by Donald Trump.
Did you? I missed the story completely in late March. I went back to check on what I was doing then, and the answer was writing about “Bloodbathgate,” so I don’t have much of an excuse. (To recall that trifling fake-news kerfuffle from the early campaign is to remind ourselves of how much this election cycle has spiritually aged us.) But, yes, Trump sued ABC News for defamation on March 19, and just yesterday ABC News announced a shockingly large settlement agreement: They will pay him a whopping $15 million — though as a face-saving gesture they are being allowed to pay it to his presidential library as opposed to Trump himself.
It’s all the more hilarious of a victory because I never saw it coming: Trump just got ABC News to agree to being one of the single largest corporate donors to the eventual Official Museum of MAGA Studies. They’re building his library!
If the Stephanopoulos standard holds in additional lawsuits, Trump’s presidential library could see itself entirely funded by the DNC-MSM (which somehow seems uniquely appropriate.)