Oh, George! When is 'rape' rape?
Holiday BONUS: 'Honk if you love foreskin' and Hegseth's liquor stash
The cries coming from the peanut gallery were both fierce and naive. For settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, ABC was a profile in cowardice. The network caved in the face of a showdown with a tyrant. Yadah, yadah …
The reality, of course, is more complicated. Over the weekend, ABC News settled a defamation suit brought by incoming President Trump against the network by agreeing to pay $15 million to a fund designated for Trump’s presidential library, and $1 million in legal fees to the law firm of Trump’s attorney in the case.
Trump filed a lawsuit against the network in response to a televised remark made in March by news anchor George Stephanopoulos, who said Trump was found liable for “rape” when he was actually found liable for “sexual assault.” Apparently, in Trump world, sexual assault isn’t so bad, but rape is an outrage.
And as others have pointed out, this is not first time in the last few months that media outlets and their bosses have screwed up or tried to avoid pissing off Trump:
Mr. Elias forgot the LA Times spiking of the Kamala Harris endorsement, but I digress …
I really think ABC made a business decision, as many companies and individuals do when they settle out of court. Given the high bar for proving the defamation of public figures such as Trump in the precedent of the New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964 (establishing “actual malice” or a “reckless disregard for the truth” on the part of the defendant), ABC probably would have prevailed.
But here’s what I have argued from the very beginning — and thankfully I later learned that many others, including Northeastern journalism Prof. Dan Kennedy and CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, embraced it as well:
As a practical matter, for a company like Disney (ranked 48th on the Fortune 500), $16 million is not a high price to make the case go away. But here’s the thing many are missing in this analysis. If the case had proceeded, it would have entered what is known as the pre-trial “discovery phase” in which evidence is demanded by both parties in order to build a case. This includes not only depositions under oath, but previous internal communications as well.
I can easily imagine a scenario in which Trump’s legal team obtains internal emails and text messages from ABC that could prove highly embarrassing to the network and do considerable damage to its brand. Worse yet, some of the internals could be so incendiary as to demonstrate “actual malice,” one of the standards for winning a defamation case for public figures such as Trump.
But a New York Times report, Inside Disney’s Decision to Settle a Trump Defamation Suit, published Wednesday (free link), paints a pretty grim picture for ABC’s parent company. Disney lawyers and executives “determined that they had a flawed case”, in part because in tossing Disney’s motion to dismiss the case, a federal judge in Florida wrote:
“A reasonable jury could interpret Stephanopoulos’s statements as defamatory,” Judge Altonaga wrote, and then added an emphasis in italics. “Stephanopoulos stated ten times that a jury — or juries — had found plaintiff liable for rape.”
This sounds like careless use of language on Stephanopoulos’ part. If he had simply said, as others had before him, something to the effect that, “Judge Kaplan said that the verdict found that Trump had raped Carroll according to the common definition of the word,” then proving defamation would have been near-impossible for Trump’s legal team. In other words, the newsman should have hedged by saying, “The judge said he raped her.”
I’m sure network executives have also learned a lot from the Dominion Voting Systems vs. Fox News case. During discovery, internal communications revealed that Fox executives knew the network’s reporting about Dominion to be false, dealing a deadly blow to its defense and culminating in a hastily arranged $787.5 million settlement before the case could even be tried.
There was another story by Dylan Byers of Puck (paywall) and summarized in an email from Puck below:
Amid the debate surrounding whether this amounted to a “capitulation” to the incoming administration, Dylan reveals some of the internal calculations made by Disney’s general counsel to stop the proceedings—including fears that George Stephanopoulos’s digital correspondence might expose the anchor, the news network, and the parent company to greater scrutiny. “He is sloppy electronically,” said a source of Stephanopoulos.
In a word, nothing good could come out of this trial for ABC.
Trump’s success in his battle against ABC has apparently emboldened him to seek further retribution on the press and others in the public eye who he thinks have wronged him. Trump’s lawyer recently filed suit against The Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer for a poll they conducted showing Kamala Harris leading him in red-state Iowa by 3 points, even though Trump wound up winning by more than 13 points. The suits sounds preposterous on its face, but Trump’s lawyers are alleging the pollster violated consumer protection laws in Iowa, including “ongoing deceptive and misleading acts and practices” related to polling. It’s a stretch but it will surely make pollsters think twice before publishing outlier polls.
Trump has also sued CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris he insists was deceptively edited. Imagine that. News organizations are now being sued for editing, which is half of the activity in any newsroom. The phrase “chilling effect” is often overused, but in this case the shoe fits perfectly.
Finally, it seems that progressives are suggesting that any out-of-court media settlement of a defamation suit brought by Trump is simply spineless capitulation. The CBS and Des Moines Register suits are worth fighting. The ABC case, not so much.
‘Honk if you love foreskin?’
As my wife and I were driving back from a weekend getaway to the beach in Corpus Christi, we encountered a street demonstration near San Antonio. Since Texas is largely hostile to abortion rights (ask Colin Allred), I figured the demonstrators were showing their “pro-life” colors.
We could see that it was a group of men dressed in white and the word “circumcision” was written on some of their placards. It seemed very strange that a group of men would feel compelled to stage a street protest against something neither of us thought was terribly controversial.
At that point, the image pretty much left our minds until a couple of days later when I noticed this piece in the San Antonio Express-News, headlined:
“I want my foreskin back,’ say anti-circumcision protesters in bloody pants in San Antonio (free link)
At least 10 protesters held signs with messages like “circumcision is sexual mutilation,” “you deserve your whole penis,” and “honk if you love foreskin.”
Calling themselves “Bloodstained Men” and wearing “bright white pants stained red in the crotch,” the men say their main objection is that the operation is almost always performed without consent. This is objectively true because newborn babies cannot consent to anything. See the video below:
I understand the need to feel passionate about something during your time on earth, but how would this cause rank in the top 10 in anyone’s life? As the Express-News reported:
“Happening locally & all I can say is, If my circumcision offends you, you just circumcised our chance of being friends,” one Facebook user wrote.
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The Cowgills wish all of our friends and family a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanza, Happy Festivus or whatever it is you celebrate.
See you in the new year. I’ll be full of unsustainable resolutions!
For those who might have forgotten Festivus:
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P.S. If there are any among you who remain skeptical about the reporting on the drinking habits of Trump’s pick for defense secretary Pete Hegseth, we have new reporting from Meidas Touch, including photos from Hegseth’s own social media accounts — posts that he has been too blockheaded to remove. Drinking appears to be part of his “brand.”
These posts collectively show that Hegseth’s liquor collection has been a feature of his office for a span of up to six years, from 2019 to 2024. Over time, the bottles in the collection appear to change, indicating consistent usage or replenishment.
I have no love for the Pete Hegseth reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker. But your pile-on with could/be/fake photos from other sources of his “liquor stash” is unworthy of your own journalism standards.
Honk, and I always enjoy your comments. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all. Wayne, with my collection of elephants