The nature of bullies is to strike fear in the hearts of their targets in order to demand compliance with their own self-aggrandizement.
Donald Trump is a classic bully, and he just made ABC News bow down to him on the school playground when they didn’t have to.
This is a horrible portent for a free press in America. And it illustrates why national media outlets should not be run by corporations more concerned about avoiding litigation than telling the truth.
ABC News, which is owned by Disney, now joins the ranks of Jeff Bezos and his Washington Post in preemptive kowtowing to the most dangerous man in America. Bezos, you will recall, quashed the Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in the presidential race. Bezos, by most accounts, feared endangering his other business interests by angering both Trump and his adoring lapdog, Elon Musk.
“ABC News has taken the disgust to a new level by actually giving Trump money.”
To professional journalists, that was disgusting enough. But ABC News has taken the disgust to a new level by actually giving Trump money — the one thing he craves more than attention — to settle a lawsuit the newspaper likely would have won.
But when you’re willing to kiss the ring, you’re gonna kiss the ring.
What happened
Here’s the backstory.
E. Jean Carroll l(Photo by Alex Kent/Getty Images)
On March 10, during a segment of ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos said Trump had been “found liable for rape” and for “defaming the victim of that rape.” The reference was to two lawsuits filed by E. Jean Carroll against Trump. In the first, Trump was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll. A jury ordered him to pay her $5 million. In the second trial, Trump was found liable on additional defamation claims and ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million.
Trump, of course, denies all the 69 sexual abuse allegations against him, despite being on tape saying when you’re a star you can grab women “by the pussy” and do whatever you want.
So Trump sued ABC and Stephanopoulos in federal court in Miami on the pretense that “sexual assault” is not the same thing as “rape” and therefore he had been defamed.
Rather than litigate that fine point, ABC News caved and agreed to send $15 million to help fund a presidential library for Trump and to pay $1 million in Trump’s legal fees.
Litigation as bullying
This is a good time to remember that Trump has made a career out of filing suit against people and companies while deflecting every accusation against him.
A direct quote from Wikipedia: “From 1973 until he was elected president in 2016, Donald Trump and his businesses were involved in over 4,000 legal cases in United States federal and state courts, including battles with casino patrons, million-dollar real estate lawsuits, personal defamation lawsuits, and over 100 business tax disputes. He has also been accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault, with one accusation resulting in him being held civilly liable. One case involved a 13-year-old child.”
“For him, lawsuits are a way of life. And a form of intimidation.”
Trump is the kind of bully who tries to wear down his opponents through litigation. Over and over. For him, lawsuits are a way of life. And a form of intimidation.
The Columbia Journalism Review noted Trump also has a long history of suing media organizations.
Richard Tofel, former president of ProPublica, explained in a CJR opinion piece: “Years after losing one of those cases — against Timothy L. O’Brien, then a New York Times business reporter and now the editor of Bloomberg Opinion — Trump told the Washington Post in an interview that “he knew he couldn’t win the suit but brought it anyway to make a point. ‘I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make (the reporter’s) life miserable, which I’m happy about.’”
Donald Trump raises a fist at the end of his rally at the Riverfront Sports Complex in Scranton, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Aimee Dilger / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images)
Yes, he’s just getting started
Lay that against Trump’s victory lap Monday in the ABC News settlement. A subhead on The New Republic article about this is titled, “Donald Trump is Feeling Emboldened in His War on Journalism.”
Trump said Monday he now intends to sue the Des Moines Register because it published a pre-election poll showing Kamala Harris jumping ahead of Trump in the state, which turned out not to be true. But there’s no law against publishing polls that get it wrong. That’s not defamation by any standard.
Trump indicated in a Monday interview that he indeed intends to sue — let’s say intimidate — other media outlets now.
“You have to do it, because they’re very dishonest,” he said. “We need a great media, we need a fair media. … And we need borders, we need walls, but we need borders and we need fair elections.”
“Trump wouldn’t know the truth if it jumped out of his golf bag.”
As I have written before, Trump wouldn’t know the truth if it jumped out of his golf bag. He traffics in such clouds of lies that the truth cannot be seen for miles.
He already has litigation pending against CBS News’s 60 Minutes, author Bob Woodward, and the Pulitzer Center for giving Pulitzer Prizes to journalists who wrote about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Because Trump claims Russian interference that helped him win in 2016 was a hoax, it’s somehow defamatory for the Pulitzer Committee to give its prizes to writers who wrote otherwise.
Do you see where this is going?
The ABCs of ABC’s case
In the ABC case, Trump sought to exploit a technicality in the legal definition of “sexual assault” versus “rape.” If the charges against him weren’t so serious, this would be laughable because here we have the most prolific liar and spreader of misinformation perhaps in American history claiming he is the victim of misinformation. Oh, the irony.
Here’s what a fine point this distinction is, in the words of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan: “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.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
New York’s legal definition of “rape” requires forcible, unconsented-to penetration with one’s penis. But Kaplan said that what the jury found Trump liable for — forced digital penetration — meets a more common definition of rape that includes penetration with any object.
“The jury’s finding of sexual abuse therefore necessarily implies that it found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated her vagina.”
And, he concluded: “The jury’s finding of sexual abuse therefore necessarily implies that it found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated her vagina.”
Clearly, Trump didn’t want to relitigate these definitions of his offensive behavior in a public courtroom, so he did what any bully would do: He took the offensive. Rather than trying to cover up his behavior, he simply asserted it wasn’t as bad as ABC News reported.
And the lawyers at Disney apparently didn’t want to litigate this either, meaning they were willing to see this as a dollars-and-cents business decision rather than a defense of a free press.
That’s exactly what Trump does and what he hopes to accomplish. In legal terms, he wants to have a “chilling effect” on anyone who would write negatively about him.
Captured without a fight
You don’t have to outlaw a free press if you bully them into preemptive submission. That’s what this is about. And already two great giants in the national media have shown us they cannot be trusted to tell the truth about Trump and his cruel lies.
In his article for CJR, Tofel says we don’t know what happened inside Disney corporate headquarters that led to the controversial settlement, then he adds this: “If corporate executives who ultimately control newsrooms are going to surrender on stories that are substantially accurate, we are indeed in for a frightening period.”
For more on why this matters, see Rodney Kennedy’s excellent analysis piece for BNG about how a free press is under assault from Trump and his allies.
Kennedy reminds us that less than 48 hours before Election Day, Trump told a rally of his supporters he wouldn’t mind if someone shot the journalists in front of him: “I have this piece of glass here, but all we have really over here is the fake news. And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much.”
Donald Trump already has done a masterful job of convincing his followers not to trust mainstream media — the ones telling the truth about all his lies — like the Wizard of Oz declaring, “Nothing to see here.”
We don’t need national media outlets like ABC News caving to Trump’s extortion. Like giving in to a bully on the playground, it’s only going to encourage him. True news organizations should fight Trump and his minions to the bitter end before giving up our constitutional rights of free expression.
Mark Wingfield
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality. His brand-new book is Troubling the Truth and Other Tales from the News.
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