What’s scarier than Trump suing to cow the media? The media caving in

ABC News in America has just settled a defamation suit Donald Trump brought against the network. ABC, which is owned by Disney, agreed to pay $US15 million ($24 million) to Trump’s presidential library foundation and pay Trump’s legal costs, supposedly another $US1 million.

In Australia, occasionally, we see settlements like this. But never for anything like $24 million. In the US, it’s very, very unusual. It certainly looks like a crushing victory for Trump in his attempts to cow the media.

Protesters outside the Federal Court in New York in January this year, during E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against him.Credit: Bloomberg

It goes back to a woman who says that, in 1996, Trump accosted her in the changing rooms of an upscale department store in Manhattan. The writer E. Jean Carroll testified – and forgive my bluntness here, but it will have relevance later – that Trump pushed her up against a wall, pawed her and digitally penetrated her.

Several civil cases ensued. I’ll skip over the complications; Carroll won all of them. However, the jury in one found that Trump had sexually assaulted, rather than raped, her. That’s because New York state law at the time defined rape as involving forced penile penetration of the vagina. (Until the state changed the law this year, in the wake of this case, even anal rape was not considered rape in the state.) Indeed, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said bluntly that what Trump did was rape in the common meaning of the term. “The jury found that Mr Trump, in fact, did exactly that,” Kaplan said.

I will pause here and let everyone reflect that the person in question has just been re-elected as US president.

Now let’s fast forward to March this year. One-time Bill Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos, now a prominent host for ABC News, interviewed a combative Trump supporter in Congress. He pressed her repeatedly about how she could support someone who’d been found liable for rape. Trump then sued ABC News for defamation, saying the jury hadn’t found that.

E. Jean Carroll arrives at Manhattan Federal Court in January, less than a year after convincing a jury that Donald Trump sexually abused her decades ago. Credit: Ted Shaffrey/AP

The ABC News settlement was unexpected. The US press, as a rule, doesn’t back down and settle cases like these; that just encourages more of them. American constitutional law makes it tough to punish even inaccurate assertions if the reporters were, in effect, operating in relatively good faith.

The case didn’t involve recklessness or even hyperbole. Rather, it involved plain speaking about a matter of public import. It’s easy to envision Stephanopoulos on the witness stand, making his case in plain language that a jury could understand, “She said he pushed her up against a wall and pushed his fingers into her vagina! That’s not rape? The judge said the jury found he raped her! Wouldn’t the judge know? Am I not allowed to repeat what a judge said?”

Easy to envision as well a Disney lawyer addressing the jury, “Imagine this predator attacking your daughter in a department store dressing room. If you said he raped her, he’d sue you!”

So the settlement is a puzzle. There are two possibilities. The denouement came just as ABC News would have to turn over its internal communications. One theory: perhaps Disney’s lawyers found Stephanopoulos or his producers saying things in emails that were embarrassing or that might have severely undercut the company’s defence. It’s interesting that Stephanopoulos himself hasn’t displayed any signs of dismay at the decision.

The other possibility, and the more likely one, is that Disney is turning tail. The Mouse House, as it’s called, isn’t like Netflix, which exists in the ether; it has theme parks and cable channels and hotels and cruise ships and studios and other interests all over the world.

Disney has been engaged in a bitter and costly years-long range war with Florida’s conservative Governor Ron DeSantis over various legal and culture-war issues. Easy to imagine the company deciding it doesn’t need more of this with a new vengeful Trump administration bent on damaging its family-friendly image.

That’s not good. It’s part of a pattern of abdication of the media’s responsibilities we’ve seen at the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, the billionaire owners of which both overruled their mastheads’ endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris. Faced with a choice of denouncing a plainly unfit candidate or currying favour with Trump, they chose the latter.

There’s another disturbing aspect that might have some relevance in Australia in years to come. It’s a deft new technique: deny any allegation – no matter how obviously true it is – and then go on the attack. It’s become very effective. You do whatever you can to damage your opponent, while the news suddenly focuses on the new lawsuit, with all the previous allegations (and, of course, all of Trump’s varied other alleged criminal activity) obscured in the kicked-up dust.

Case in point: we are now all talking about a legal settlement instead of what we should all be talking about: three women testified in open court that Donald Trump sexually assaulted them.

It’s a lesson we used to know and perhaps have to learn again. You have to stand up to bullies. Why? Because bullies are cowards. If you (metaphorically) punch them in the nose, they go away. If you don’t, they are emboldened.

The media needs to stand up, state the obvious, and keep stating it. It needs to keep saying Trump is what the courts have declared him to be: a felon, a fraudster and a sexual predator.

Bill Wyman is a former assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He lectures at the University of Sydney.

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