ABC News surrenders to Donald Trump
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 221
MEDIA RELATIONS DEP'T.
When You're a Star, the Lawyers Let You Do It
DONALD TRUMP IS a notorious rapist. Last year, a civil jury in Manhattan found that he had sexually abused E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room around 1996. Because the jurors could not decide for sure whether Trump had penetrated his victim with his penis or with his finger, they did not specifically find him liable for committing an act of rape as defined by New York law. Afterward, though, the judge declared that Carroll was legally entitled to say Trump had raped her—that the jury had found that "Mr. Trump in fact did 'rape' Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York Penal Law."
Friday, ABC and its news host George Stephanopoulos signed an agreement that the network would pay a $15 million donation to Trump's presidential foundation and $1 million in legal fees to settle a defamation lawsuit from Trump. Trump had sued the network because Stephanopoulos, while asking Republican Rep. Nancy Mace how she, as someone who had publicly identified as a rape victim, could support Trump, had said that Trump was "found liable for rape by a jury."
That was not an accurate description of the jury's findings about the sex crime that Donald Trump was liable for committing. Although Trump is, as the prevailing shorthand puts it, an adjudicated rapist, Stephanopoulos used the one piece of technical language—"liable for rape"—that the jury had not endorsed. He also incorrectly said two juries had found against Trump on the rape question; two separate juries did find that Trump defamed Carroll when he said her rape accusation was a lie, but in the second trial, the judge instructed the jury that the truth of Carroll's accusation had already been proven. The crime was, for those purposes, an established fact.
As a defamation complaint, it was foolhardy. Trump would have been dragging ABC to court to argue about exactly which variety of forcible sexual penetration he committed, and about whether he'd been called a rapist by a jury or merely by a judge who was describing the conclusions of the jury. A magistrate judge had ordered Trump to be deposed in the suit this week.
Yet instead of answering questions about his sexual abuse under oath, Trump is collecting $16 million from ABC. ABC has posted a note at the bottom of the online story about the Mace interview reading "ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024."
Under American media law, ABC had nothing to regret. It made a narrow misstatement in the course of discussing the broadly accepted, legally supported conclusion that Donald Trump is a known rapist. And, as the media critic Margaret Sullivan wrote, "The legal bar is very high for libeling a public figure, and Trump is the ultimate public figure." The only way for ABC to have lost the case would have been if the Supreme Court were to use an appeal as an excuse to throw out New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and rewrite the basic terms of publishing under the First Amendment.
ABC News—that is, the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC News—just decided on its own to act as if the protections of Times v. Sullivan were already gone. It was not a journalistic decision, nor even the kind of decision that lawyers for journalists sometimes make over the protests of the journalists involved. It was understandable only as a measure of cynicism and lawlessness: someone at Disney had to calculate that $16 million was less than the amount of money that the malice of President Donald Trump could cost the company over the next four years.
For journalists, it was treachery, and not an act of treachery restricted to the people who have to work at ABC News. Before the reactionary movement of theTrump era even coalesced around Donald Trump, America's new oligarchs had started figuring out that lawsuits could be weapons against the press even when the law itself was on the press' side. Being sued soaks up not just legal costs but time and attention—and you can't get back the time and attention when you prevail, even if you do recover the legal fees. Lawsuits mean the risk of having a hostile party rifling through your email and notes, or asking you slanted and embarrassing questions under deposition. They keep you focused on defending what you've done, rather than going out and doing more.
The goal on the plaintiff's side is harassment and intimidation, backed by the slight but real chance that any particular judge might actually ignore the law and hand them an outright win. Elon Musk's lawsuit against Media Matters, claiming the group had been deceptive in showing that X.com was serving ads alongside hateful posts, would have been doomed in a neutral court, but Musk was able to put it in front of Judge Reed O'Connor of the Northern District of Texas, who happens to own Tesla stock. O'Connor was not only willing to let the case go forward, but to issue a ruling, now paused on appeal, that Musk could force Media Matters to hand over the identities of its donors.
And now ABC has caved in to a pointless and abusive complaint, because the plaintiff is going to be running the country. It is apologizing for being a little sloppy in discussing the president-elect's history of sexual abuse—setting a new standard of professional etiquette, if not yet of law. Donald Trump will make trouble for you if you keep talking about the legal conclusion that he raped E. Jean Carroll. It's not appropriate to tell the truth about the man who's going to be president.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, December 15, 2024
★★★ Pigeons turned, curve-winged, against a sunny morning sky. Far above them, equally bright and distinct, a long airliner was passing. The light drained away at midday, leading into a gray afternoon that acquired a nighttime blue cast long before sundown. The slides had gotten painfully cold to wear again out on the balcony. A soft and tentative sound of rain grew loud and declarative as the night wore on.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Hygienic Cook Book: A Collection of Choice Recipes Carefully Tested, by Jacob Arnbrecht, published in 1914 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
FRUIT SANDWICHES
Prepare an orange jelly or lemon jelly.
Mold in shallow tins of uniform size. Prepare a stiff marmalade of equal parts of figs and dates and English walnuts ground fine or pressed through a colander, and mixed with a little lemon juice.
Arrange the jelly and marmalade in alternate layers, having three layers of jelly and two of marmalade; serve with whipped cream or beaten meltose.
FRUIT JELLY
1 pt. fruit juice of any kind
1 pt. hot water
1/2 oz. vegetable gelatine
1 1/3 cups sugar
Soak gelatine one to three hours or longer in hot water (about 120° F.), drain off the water and cook in the pint of hot water eight or ten minutes, or until perfectly clear; strain through a cheesecloth or a fine strainer, and add to the fruit juice.
Mix well and dish out in sherbet cups, previously wet in cold water, and set away to cool. Serve plain or with lemon sauce.
ORANGE JELLY
2 2/3 cups orange juice 2 cups hot water
1 1/3 cups lemon juice 2 cups sugar
1/2 oz. vegetable gelatine
Make the same as fruit jell, using orange and lemon juice.
LEMON JELLY
1 1/4 cups lemon juice
1 1/4 cups boiling water
2 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups cold water
1/3 vegetable gelatine
Prepare the same as for fruit jelly, strain through a cheesecloth or fine strainer, and add to the juice, which has been added to cold water and sugar; fill sherbet cups, which have been wet in cold water, and set away to cool.
Serve with lemon or fruit sauce.
LEMON SAUCE
1 qt. water
1/2 cup lemon juice
1 cup sugar
2 tbsp. cornstarch
1 tbsp. butter
Pinch of salt
Make the same as orange sauce. If a stronger flavor is desired add the grated rind of one lemon.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
