Donald Trump is facing criticism for suing ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for defamation after the host said the ex-president had been found liable for “rape.”
“In an interview on ‘This Week,’ Stephanopoulos pressed Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, a rape survivor, over her continued support of Trump after a jury found he sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $88 million for battery and defamation,” CNN reports. “Stephanopoulos asserted multiple times in the interview with Mace that Trump had ‘raped’ Carroll.”
“You endorsed Donald Trump for president. Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony that we just saw?” Stephanopoulos asked Mace, as CNN reported.
A federal jury did not find Carroll had proved Trump had raped her, but Senior U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan later “concluded that the claim Trump raped Carroll was ‘substantially true,'” according to CNN.
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“Indeed, the jury’s verdict in Carroll II establishes, as against Mr Trump, the fact that Mr Trump ‘raped her’, albeit digitally rather than with his penis. Thus, it establishes against him the substantial truth of Ms Carroll’s ‘rape’ accusations,” Judge Kaplan wrote.
Attorney George Conway took Trump to task while offering some legal insight.
“The theory of Trump’s complaint here is that, since the jury in Carroll II, the case tried last year, unanimously found that Trump forcibly and without consent penetrated Carroll’s vagina with his fingers and not his penis, and since this constituted sexual assault and not rape as defined by the New York Penal Code, Stephanopoulos libeled him by saying he had been held liable for ‘rape,’ even though the judge in the Carroll case has held multiple times since the verdict that in common parlance (and the law of most other jurisdictions) forcible digital penetration is rape,” Conway writes.
“In other words, Trump is suing Stephanopoulos and ABC because Stephanopoulos repeated what a federal district judge has said repeatedly in written opinions.”
“By bringing this lawsuit, Trump will only bring more public attention to what he did to Carroll. And he and his lawyers may very well be—in fact, ought to be—sanctioned,” Conway adds, concluding: “Another brilliant stable-genius move. Trump is not only a rapist, he’s a nut job, and a very, very dumb one at that.”
Conway also wrote: “This complaint is completely wacko, like the person who filed it.”
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