Splitting sculpted hairs
Don’t use the R-word.
The extremely litigous future former president actually won one in court this week. ABC News agreed to pay Donald J. Trump $15 million dollars in a defamation lawsuit brought against network anchor George Stephanopoulos and his employer, plus $1 million in legal fees. That’s a lot of Eau de Trump.
The network agreed to make a $15 million contribution to a “Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff.” [Read on once you’ve stopped laughing about where that money will actually wind up.] The network will also issue a statement of “regret” over comments made by Stephanopoulos in a March 10 interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.).
As NBC News tells the tale:
In the initial complaint, Trump’s lawyers alleged that Stephanopoulos “knowingly or recklessly made multiple false and disparaging statements regarding Plaintiff during ABC broadcasts.”
Mace, who has publicly discussed being [R-worded] as a teenager, was asked during the March interview with Stephanopoulos about Trump’s treatment of women and the E. Jean Carroll case.
Stephanopoulos said during the interview that Trump “has been found liable for [R-word] by a jury.” Trump, however, was found liable in a civil case for sexually abusing Carroll, not liable for her alleged {R-word] . The nine-member jury in that case checked the box marked “no” when asked whether Carroll had proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that “Mr. Trump [R-worded] Ms. Carroll.”
The judge in the civil case elaborated that what Trump did to Carroll in that Bergdorf Goodman dressing room did not fit New York’s “far narrower” definition of [R-word] (Washington Post):
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘[R-worded]’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘[R-worded]’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘[R-word],’” 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.”
I’m surprised that Trump doesn’t make the Frost-Nixon defense that when the future president does it … that means that it is not [R-word].