ABC News made a terrible mistake when it agreed to settle President-elect Donald Trump's defamation case, wrote Eric Wemple in a scathing opinion analysis for The Washington Post on Monday.
The settlement, which includes a contribution of $15 million to fund a presidential library for Trump, stems from anchor George Stephanopoulos repeatedly saying Trump was found "liable for rape" in an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), which Trump's attorneys argued was defamatory because the jury in the E. Jean Carroll case found him liable for sexual abuse.
Wemple called it "gobsmacking" that ABC settled the case, let alone for the amount they did. By any measure, he argued, ABC would have prevailed at trial, and all this serves to do is embolden Trump to continue harassing reporters with legal action.
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"In a motion to dismiss the case, lawyers for ABC News argued that Stephanopoulos’s claims were 'substantially true,' a legal standard that allows for inaccuracies of narrow bandwidth, so long as the gist of the segment remains accurate," wrote Wemple. "Key to this defense are the words of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who made a ruling in posttrial proceedings that was central to both Stephanopoulos’s interview with Mace and, ultimately, the legal defense of ABC News. As The Post’s Aaron Blake explained at the time, Kaplan reasoned that the jury found Trump liable for rape under a common understanding of the offense."
However, the judge declined to throw the case out at the preliminary stage on this basis — and ABC made a hard pivot.
"Here’s the peculiar dimension of this whole affair: The posture of ABC News progressed from unreasonably dismissive (rejecting legitimate demands for correction) to unreasonably accommodating (giving away the store to Trump via $15 million, a note of contrition and so on)," wrote Wemple.
While he couldn't explain why that decision was made, he noted that such decisions often come from upper executives, with the reporters having no say.
All of this is absurd, he concluded, because had the case progressed to trial, "Trump would have had to prove that ABC News acted with knowledge of the false statements or proceeded with reckless disregard of their truth or falsity, per the landmark Supreme Court ruling New York Times v. Sullivan" — a highly demanding standard.
"Accompanying the luxury of those protections is the obligation to actually use them," he wrote. "As opposed to bailing on a winnable case from a man with a history of exploiting the civil justice system."
