ABC lawyers say Trump defamation suit against George Stephanopoulos over found liable for rape segment must be dismissed
Source: Law & Crime
May 12th, 2024, 4:50 pm
Attorneys representing ABC and George Stephanopoulos have asked a federal judge to throw out Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the network over a March interview of Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., where the “This Week” host “more than 10 times” said the former president had been found “liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll civil case. The lawyers, seeking dismissal “with prejudice” so the Trump claims can’t be filed again, defended Stephanopoulos’ statements as “substantially true” and pointed to a Washington Post article that the host referred to while on air.
“In this case, former President Trump seeks to re-litigate a meritless theory of defamation that he has already lost twice in New York. Mr. Trump is collaterally estopped from doing so here,” attorneys Nathan Siegel and Rachel Fugate wrote Friday. “And if this Court were to reach the merits, at bottom, this case asserts that even after a jury has found that a person committed a violent sexual assault, it is defamatory to say that the person committed a ‘rape.’ That is not a proposition Florida law recognizes.”
But what the Trump lawsuit did not grapple with, as Law&Crime reported, was what Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said in his rulings, specifically that forcible digital penetration is widely understood to be “rape.”
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,'” Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/must-be-dismissed-abcs-lawyers-move-to-throw-out-trump-lawsuit-over-found-liable-for-rape-segment/
Full headline: ‘Substantially true’: ABC lawyers say Trump defamation suit against George Stephanopoulos over ‘found liable for rape’ segment ‘must be dismissed,’ cite WaPo article
Link to MOTION (PDF) - https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.664183/gov.uscourts.flsd.664183.24.0.pdf
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