MSNBC Rips ABC-Trump Defamation Case Settlement, Says Comment for Which ABC Paid Trump $15 Million ‘Seems to Hold Up’

MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend said Sunday morning that comments George Stephanopoulos made about President-elect Donald Trump that resulted in him and ABC News settling a defamation suit were valid.

Sanders-Townsend said that in her estimation, language from Stephanopoulos that Trump had been found liable for the rape of E. Jean Carroll appeared to her to be factually accurate.

On Saturday, ABC agreed to pay Trump $15 million and apologized for comments Stephanopoulos made earlier this year during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC).

Mace and Stephanopoulos discussed the Carroll-Trump defamation civil suit, in which Trump was found liable and ordered to pay out millions. Stephanopoulos referred to the outcome of the trial as Trump having been adjudicated a rapist by asking Mace – among others – the following questions:

“How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony we just saw?”

“You’ve endorsed Donald Trump for president. Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape.”

Trump sued, arguing those and other such statements were made with “malice” and with a blatant disregard for the truth – which he said was the civil jury in the case did not find by a preponderance of the evidence Trump had committed rape. Trump’s argument has been disputed by the judge in the case.

On MSNBC’s The Weekend Sunday, a panel discussed the defamation suit and whether it would be damaging to a free press. During one exchange, Sanders-Townsend noted the facts of the case and concluded:

I would just say, I mean, this feels like it has a real chilling effect. Like, I mean, shout out to the standards department standards is always making sure that we are keeping the bar high and substantive and accurate. But what George Stephanopoulos said in that interview, I mean, it seems to hold up, what the judge said after the back and now he’s news organization and himself, George Stephanopoulos himself is paying $1 million of his own money to the lawyers and ABC and $50 million. It’s insane.

In a later comment on Sunday’s show, Sanders-Townsend offered the following clarification:

This is George Stephanopoulos, just to be clear about what he said during the interview, he said that Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury. This is according to an NBC article. Trump, however, was found liable in a civil case for sexually abusing Carroll, not for her alleged rape. The nine-member jury in that case checked the box mark no, when asked whether Carroll had proven by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Trump raped Carroll.

Later on Sunday evening, MSNBC contributor Lisa Rubin added further context to the language Stephanopoulos used during his interview with Mace when she noted the following:

What I was going to say is I’m not sure that George Stephanopoulos was wrong in a colloquial sense, but where this case emerges from and where he got tripped up is in attempting to describe what was found by the jury. And as you noted, the jury itself found very precisely that Donald Trump did not commit rape within the technical definition of rape in New York’s criminal code. They found him liable for sexual abuse. Now, [Judge Lewis Kaplan], who is the judge in the New York cases brought by E. Jean Carroll and a separate finding found that Donald Trump could not sue E. Jean Carroll for defamation after that verdict because, colloquially speaking, what the jury had found that Donald Trump did to E. Jean Carroll could be understood by normal, non-legal people as a rape. It is a – essentially what they found was that he digitally penetrated her, but New York law says that unless there is genital-to-genital contact, it’s not rape.

The problem with what Stephanopoulos said was that he was trying to describe the jury verdict, not what conventional people understood, or at least the difference that I just described to you is how a Florida district court judge saw it when faced with the motion to dismiss by Stephanopoulos and ABC. And having not won on that initial motion to dismiss on solely legal grounds, ABC had said that, essentially, what the New York judge found and what George Stephanopoulos said were so similar that the issue had already been litigated and there was nothing for Donald Trump to sue about, that Florida judge disagreed. And that’s what allowed the case to continue and put ABC in the position of either having to continue to litigate through discovery and potentially to trial, or to settle this thing now, shortly after a judge ruled on Friday that both sides were going to have to sit for their deposition.

Watch above via MSNBC.