Fact Check: George Stephanopoulos Lies About Trump and ‘Rape’

CLAIM: ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos claimed that former President Donald was “found liable for rape by a jury.”

VERDICT: FALSE. A jury in New York found that Trump was not liable for rape in a lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll.

Stephanopoulos repeatedly claimed, as he interviewed Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), that Trump had been found “liable” for “rape.” In fact, he was found not to be liable; he was found liable for “sexual abuse” and, later for defamation. There are problems with both of those verdicts, but even if Trump were liable (in a civil sense, not a criminal one, as Mace noted), the fact is that he was never found liable for rape. And it borders on defamation for Stephanopoulos to claim otherwise.

As Breitbart News reported last May:

A jury in New York found former President Donald Trump liable Tuesday for sexual abuse and battery of writer E. Jean Carroll three decades ago, though not liable for rape, and awarded $5 million in civil damages against him.

The jury also found Trump defamed Ms. Carroll in his reactions to her lawsuit, which was encouraged by anti-Trump lawyer George Conway and backed by Democrat mega-donor Reid Hoffman, an associate of the late convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.

It is true that Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in the case said that Trump was found to have “raped” Carroll in the colloquial sense. But the judge’s claim was the subject of widespread criticism, and the jury specifically found Trump not liable.

It was Stephanopoulos who used the word “jury,” which makes his statement 100% false, not even defensible as a colloquial use of the term “rape” (as an apparent substitute for “sexual abuse”).

Mace pointed out that Stephanopoulous was trying to “shame” her by using her own experience as a rape survivor to say she should be ashamed to endorse Trump, who had been accused of rape. In that context, his lie was even worse.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.