Emboldened by ABC settlement, Trump threatens more lawsuits against the press
President-elect Donald Trump had not been terribly successful in suing media organizations until this weekend when ABC News agreed to settle a closely-watched defamation case he brought against the network to the tune of $16 million.
Now, Trump is expanding his threats of legal action against the news media as he prepares to move back into the White House, stating he wants to “straighten out the press.”
On Monday, Trump said he has a new target: The Des-Moines Register newspaper, which he said he plans to sue “today or tomorrow” over its final poll of Iowa voters that showed him losing the November election to Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump made the comments during a wide-ranging press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida where he said he’d bring the lawsuit against the storied Iowa newspaper because he believed the poll “was fraud and it was election interference.”
The Register’s final poll before Election Day, conducted by legendary pollster J. Ann Selzer, showed Harris leading Trump 47-44% among likely voters in the state, a bombshell result setting off a flurry of coverage that Harris could possibly pull an upset in a state Trump won in 2016 and 2020. Other surveys had found Trump comfortably ahead of Harris in the state.
Trump went on to win the state by a 13-point margin.
“She’s gotten me right always. She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing,” Trump said on Monday.
Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson for The Register’s parent company Gannett, said in a statement the newspaper has “acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer.”
“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit,” Anton said. [Continue reading…]
In July of 2023, New York Judge Lewis Kaplan issued a clarification in the civil cases brought by author E. Jean Carroll against President-elect Donald Trump. A New York jury had ruled in May of that year that Trump was liable for sexual abuse and defamation against Carroll. According to New York criminal law, “rape” is narrowly defined as non-consenual vaginal penetration by a penis, and all other forceful acts of sexual assault are referred to as “sexual abuse.”
“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,’” Kaplan wrote in the July ruling, dismissing an effort by Trump to lower the penalties awarded to Carroll. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that,” Kaplan added.
The tug of war between New York’s criminal code and the common understanding of the word “rape” was at the center of a lawsuit, filed in March, thet Trump brought against ABC News, and which ABC News settled in the form of a $15 million payment to Trump’s presidential library fund earlier this month.
The president-elect alleged that ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos had defamed him when he stated during a March segment that Trump had been found liable for “rape” and “defaming the victim of that rape” rather than sexual abuse. Facing an order for depositions from both Stephanopoulos and Trump — and a prospective lengthy and invasive legal battle — the parties agreed to settle the dispute.
Among the rank-and-file of the network, however, the settlement is raising hackles. Within ABC News — among a number of its producers, editors, and other journalists involved in investigative and political coverage — the move was immediately met with quiet anger and frustration, an ABC News reporter set to cover the second Trump presidency, and two other sources with knowledge of internal reactions, tell Rolling Stone. [Continue reading…]