Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against ABC News and one of its lead anchors, George Stephanopoulos, on Tuesday, arguing that the news network got it all wrong in the coverage of his E. Jean Carroll case—he’s just a sexual abuser.
The suit hinges on particular legal phrasing stemming from New York’s penal code. In a Tuesday filing, Trump’s attorneys argued that Stephanopoulos had wrongly cited Trump’s judgment in an interview earlier this month, in which the anchor questioned Representative Nancy Mace on endorsing Trump, even though he had been “found liable for rape.” Mace has said she’s a survivor herself.
“Given that this was the first question of the interview, combined with the intensity and persistence of the questioning engaged in by Stephanopoulos of an actual rape victim, it was clear that Stephanopoulos maliciously intended to convince his viewers of a falsity, i.e. that plaintiff had been found liable for rape,” they wrote.
It’s unclear how the verbiage will play out in court, though Trump’s unexpected specificity flies in the face of another precedent set by the court. In July, Judge Lewis Kaplan clarified that although New York penal law has a “far narrower” definition of rape, the jury still found Trump to have raped Carroll in the modern sense of the word.
“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 at the time.
“Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that [rape, as ‘commonly’ understood].”
Trump’s sudden focus on language comes at a time when he’s scrambling to pay up on his $454 million judgment from his New York bank fraud trial, which is still on the rise, accruing more than $100,000 in interest with each passing day. In a filing to a New York appeals court on Monday, Trump’s attorneys announced that they had been unable to secure a bond to cover the massive legal penalty for committing widespread fraud related to Trump’s real estate operation. More than 30 suretors reportedly refused to accept Trump’s real estate assets as collateral, instead demanding upward of $1 billion to offer the bond—which Trump says he and his businesses just don’t have. That announcement came part in parcel with a ginormous ask by team Trump: Let Trump appeal the case without paying up at all, and maintain the stay that will allow him to continue borrowing money from New York financial institutions. We’ll see how that one works out for him.
