This is frightening. I mean, this is frightening in a way that no other defamation lawsuit in history has been frightening. ABC News clearly does not want the bad press that Donald Trump would generate against them, so they have done the unthinkable. They have agreed with Trump’s skewed version of the facts and are making a large settlement. George Stefanopoulos was interviewing Nancy Mace when he made the true claim that Trump had been found civilly liable as a rapist. That is accurate. Now, ABC News, a huge, award winning outlet is claiming that that statement was inaccurate. Take a freaking look.
NEW YORK — ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
According to settlement documents made public Saturday, ABC will also post a note on its website expressing regret over the claim in a March 10 segment on Stephanopoulos’ “This Week” program and pay $1 million in legal fees to Trump’s lawyer.
In a statement, ABC News said: “We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing.”
Trump sued Stephanopoulos and ABC for defamation days after the anchor claimed during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., that Trump had been “found liable for rape,” which misstated the verdicts in Carroll’s two lawsuits against him.
Last year, Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll and was ordered to pay her $5 million. In January, he was found liable on additional defamation claims and ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million. Trump is appealing both verdicts.
Neither verdict involved a finding of rape as defined under New York law. […]
The judge said the verdict did not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed … the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
If you’ve got a journalism degree, take it out of the glass and set fire to it. Journalism as we know it, is dead. And when I say, “As we know it,” I mean that the first ethic is the pursuit of truth.
Truth is dead. Color it gone. We are looking at a situation here where a major news outlet decided that it would be cheaper and in their best interests to go along with Trump’s allegation of defamation and to characterize Stefanopoulos’ statement as “inaccurate” when it was not.
If anybody doubts that mainstream media is owned by billionaires who are in fact dictating not only editorial content but the news itself, disabuse yourself of that notion right now. And this is just the beginning. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Trump controls the present and we are phuqued six ways to Sunday.
Ursula, ABC News is owned by the Walt Disney Company, headquartered in Burbank, across the road from the Disney studios. For Mickey Mouse to cave so shamelessly to Trumpler in this case might suggest that the famous rodent was so bruised in its previous brawl with Trumpworld, courtesy of deSantis in Florida, that it’s lost all stomach for a fight.
The politics of fear.
Last seen with McCarthy in the ’50s.
Because it costs so much money to fight lawsuits, it’s easier to give in.
Which Trump relies on.
When the truth gets expensive, no-one can afford it. The liars win.
Well now that everything is hunky-dory between ABC and Trump, let’s see who was really damaged? Stephanopoulos, for being made to look like a liar —, but even more the American public for having to suffer one of its supposedly most respectable news agencies paying 15 million dollars to humiliate its own news staff by publicly confessing that as far as they are concerned the truth doesn’t matter. If i watched ABC News (which i never do), I would certainly stop doing so after such a demonstration of cowardice and lack of principle.
Oh I almost forgot. Also, to arbitrarily discredit a legally constituted judge and jury … I think that is the worst of all. Unfortunately, Judger Merchan has had to postpone sentencing. But the verdict was already delivered.
And has emboldened Trump to do it again. Fortunately a settlement has no legal force. If Trump continues using this trick in the war against truth (and I think that he almost certainly will) I hope some one with calloons (coillons) and financial resources will stand up and fight it in court. How is it legal to force someone to retract something that is demonstrably true?