Some people are more litigious than others. Donald Trump is a litigious person. That fact is well-known.
ABC News and George Stephanopoulos are being sued by Trump and it is delicious. Stephanopoulos is the host of ABC’s This Week on Sunday mornings. A couple of weeks ago, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) was a guest on the show. Mace endorsed Trump in the 2024 general election. Stephanopoulos tried to shame Mace for the endorsement, given that she’s a rape victim. She was raped at the age of 16.
Nancy Mace destroyed George Stephanopoulos.
During their back-and-forth argument, Stephanopoulos kept inserting Trump’s legal battle with E. Jean Carroll, the woman who accused Trump of rape from an incident over 30 years ago in a retail store in Manhattan. Carroll conveniently found the nerve to bring the alleged assault forward, though it was outside the statute of limitations, thanks to the support of a NeverTrump Republican, George Conway. Conway, the former husband of Kellyanne Conway, met E. Jean Carroll in 2019 at a party and encouraged her to sue Trump. He walked her through the legal process (he’s a lawyer) on his iPad, according to reports, and followed up with an email that included a recommendation of the attorney she hired.
Trump was found guilty of sexual assault of Carroll by a jury, not of rape. He was also found guilty of defaming her. The key here is that Trump was not found guilty of rape.
Stephanopoulos repeatedly said that Trump was found guilty of rape and Nancy Mace pushed back to correct him. She said it was a case of sexual assault, not rape, with Trump. Nonetheless, Stephanopoulos persisted.
“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.
The South Carolina Republican defended her support of the former president, arguing that the jury decision was merely in a civil case. “It was not a criminal court case, number one,” she told Stephanopoulos. “Number two, I live with shame. And you’re asking me a question about my political choices trying to shame me as a rape victim.”
The judge in the case dismissed a countersuit months later. She concluded the claim that Trump raped Carroll was “substantially true.”
“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 Lewis Kaplan wrote.
Words matter. The judge knew that. Trump knows it. Lil George knows it, too. He deliberately used the word rape to connect Mace to it and drag her into a corner over her choice to endorse Trump.
Trump’s lawsuit was filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida. Trump did not specify a dollar amount in his lawsuit. It claims George’s statements were “false, intentional, malicious, and designed to cause harm.” I’m not a lawyer but I play one here now and then. I agree with the lawsuit’s claim. I watched that interview and it was disgusting.
There didn’t have to be a lawsuit. Trump’s representatives contacted ABC about a retraction after the interview. ABC did not apologize or correct the record. So, the lawsuit was filed.
Trump’s legal team requested a jury trial.
Nancy Mace conducted a master class on how to handle a Democrat partisan hack as he is trying to interview with gotcha-style questions. She held the line and didn’t cede anything to lil George. She repeated herself over and over as he continued to repeat his rape question. He was out of his league with her. She was the first woman to graduate from The Citadel and her training showed. She didn’t waiver. That back and forth took up almost all of the interview. The only other question he had time to ask was on January 6.
The interview was an SNL level of ridiculousness. It was ballsy of Stephanopoulos, of all people, to try to shame Mace for her support of Trump, given that he was in former President Bill Clinton’s inner circle during his time in the White House. Stephanopoulos helped handle the “bimbo eruptions,” as he called them. His association with the Clinton White House is how he got the ABC News gig.
Mace received a menacing threat after the show aired. Fortunately, a suspect was placed into custody.
This individual threatened to rape me, then kill me and then murder female members of my family. @GStephanopoulos will never know the damage he and @ThisWeekABC have done to put me and the women in my family in harms way… all to score cheap political points on a rape survivor. https://t.co/PTXFAy2ZNo
— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) March 16, 2024
As of this writing, ABC has not released a statement on the lawsuit.
