It's Simple, Like ABC

Illustration: Maura Losch/Axios

Hello.

Whoa.

This just in: ABC has agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump’s presidential library in settlement of a defamation lawsuit Trump filed against the network. The settlement was over a statement George Stephanopoulos made repeatedly in a broadcast in March: that a jury had found the former president civilly “liable” for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. As part of the settlement, the station will have to say they “regret” having misstated things. They also contributed $1 million more to cover Trump’s legal fees.

Well, good, right? I mean, you can’t just go around smearing people by calling them rapists when they aren’t rapists, right?

Right. When they aren’t rapists.

Ahem. This special edition of …

… wishes to very briefly investigate this issue, as presented just now by The Washington Post.

After reporting the facts of the settlement, as summarized above, the Post story went on:

“Last year, a Manhattan jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed Carroll, stopping short of saying he committed rape, which the writer had accused him of doing in the mid-1990s. Notably, a judge later filed a motion to clarify that the jury in Carroll’s case had determined that Trump’s abuse against her was rape, which has a “far narrower” definition in New York law.

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

The Washington Post — whose owner, in an unprecedented act of media-mogul suckuppery, earlier this week donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inauguration expenses — did not further parse the two paragraphs above by saying, or implying, anywhere else in the story, some version of: What the Fuck?

It was presented just like an “oh, by the way…”

—

This is not the sort of convincing case that defendants settle for millions over — it is very mushy and quite defensible, says every single defense lawyer who’s lived since the era of the Jurisconsults in ancient Rome.

So was this yet another cowardly, shameful surrender by our mainstream media to the extortive threats of the president-elect, eviscerating the longstanding noble boast that your journalists operate “without fear or favor”? Should ABC be ashamed of itself? The Post, too, for its oddly unquestioning coverage?

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See you on Tuesday…. or before.