ABC agrees to give $15 million to Donald Trump's presidential library to settle defamation lawsuit
ABC agrees to give $15 million to Donald Trump's presidential library to settle defamation lawsuit
ABC News has agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit over inaccurate on-air assertions by anchor George Stephanopoulos.
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The judge in both cases, Lewis Kaplan, has said that the jury’s conclusion was that Carroll had failed to prove that Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law.”
Kaplan noted that the definition of rape was “far narrower” than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes and elsewhere.
The judge said the verdict did not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed ... the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
There was no defamation by Stephanopoulos. The problem is the legal definition of "rape" in the state of New York.
Did Stephanopoulos specifically state he committed the crime of rape as defined in the state of New York, or did he just say he raped her with no added context? Seems like you should be able to use the colloquial definition should be fine to use in a news bulletin.
Fortunately, the legal definition of “rape” has been recently updated in New York, probably as a direct result of the Carroll case.