After Donald Trump was found liable last year for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, the federal judge overseeing that New York case explained that the jury had essentially found that Trump had raped her, as that term is commonly understood. Nonetheless, a federal judge in Florida has allowed Trump’s defamation claim against ABC and George Stephanopoulos to proceed, based on the anchor’s use of the term “rape” to describe the jury’s verdict.
Here’s why.
As a refresher, the Carroll jury found that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her, but it didn’t find that Trump had raped her. The New York federal judge who presided over that case, Lewis Kaplan, downplayed the distinction when he rejected Trump’s challenge to the jury’s multimillion dollar award as excessive, reasoning that just because the jury declined to find that Carroll had been raped under New York law, that didn’t mean she failed to prove Trump raped her “as many people commonly understand the word.” Kaplan likewise rejected Trump’s defamation claim against Carroll for her saying that he had raped her.
This new decision stems from Stephanopoulos’ March interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., in which he questioned her support for Trump despite him being “found liable for rape.” Stephanopoulos repeated that phrase several times during the interview. ABC and Stephanopoulos argued that the former president’s defamation claim is foreclosed by the New York court’s findings. But on Wednesday, Chief Judge Cecilia Altonaga of the Southern District of Florida rejected the defense motion to dismiss Trump’s case. (If Altonaga’s name sounds familiar, that may be because the George W. Bush appointee reportedly urged U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to step aside from Trump’s classified documents case.)
In Trump’s defamation suit, Altonaga distinguished Carroll’s claim that Trump had raped her from Stephanopoulos’ characterization of the jury verdict as having found that Trump had raped her. The judge determined that a reasonable jury could interpret the anchor’s statements as defamatory.
Yet, she made clear that she wasn’t necessarily agreeing that Trump had been defamed; rather, the judge’s legal determination was that the defense didn’t present a strong enough argument to dismiss Trump’s case at this stage of litigation. “Defendants may very well convince a reasonable factfinder to follow Judge Kaplan’s reasoning or to adopt other reasoning leading to the conclusion that Stephanopoulos’s statements were not defamatory,” Altonaga wrote, adding that a jury that views the segment may find sufficient context to conclude Trump wasn’t defamed. In some respects, the ruling is like another recent Trump defamation win in Florida. In that state court case, he beat a motion to dismiss his claim against Pulitzer Prize Board members and staff, related to a statement about his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia. As with the Carroll-related claim, the rejection of that motion to dismiss doesn’t mean that Trump will ultimately prevail — only that his case can proceed. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for updates and expert analysis on the top legal stories. The newsletter will return to its regular weekly schedule when the Supreme Court’s next term kicks off in October.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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