EA discussed George Stephanopoulos’s unethical, partisan, and thoroughly biased interrogation of Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC.) about her endorsement of Donald Trump during the March 10 interview on ABC’s Sunday talking heads show, “This Week.” It was one of the more blatant examples of how the mainstream media’s partisan biases and “Get Trump!” slant has rampaged through U.S. journalism like a cancer, but nobody should have been shocked r surprised. Stephanopoulos was a Democratic operative and a Clinton minion when he was hired. His performance against Mace was George being George; it was not the first time his biases and dishonesty were put on display. ABC should never have hired him, but then ABC, like NBC, CBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post et al. have virtually abandoned ethical journalism for partisan advocacy.

Yesterday Trump’s lawyers filed a lawsuit over Stephanopoulos saying that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The jury specifically found Trump liable for sexual abuse under New York law, but not rape. Under classic defamation law, falsely stating that a woman has engaged in illicit sexual activity was per se defamation, but 1) Trump isn’t a woman 2) defamation by a news source against a public figure is measured by a tougher standard under the New York Times decision, requiring “actual malice,” and 3) George was carefully tip-toeing around the edges of acceptable (under the law) celebrity smearing. I highly doubt that Trump can prevail. Nonetheless, I’m glad he filed the lawsuit…hell, I’m not paying for his lawyers. If significant numbers of Americans who have been metaphorically sleep-walking for the past 30 years or so finally see Stephanopoulos for what he is, and can connect the dots to realize what this tells us about American journalism, it will be a good thing.

The complaint quotes the dozen times that Stephanopoulos said “rape,” though I’m most interested in only one of them:

George was being careful 11/12 of the time; careful enough to probably avoid a defamation verdict. Trump has litigated the question of whether forcible digital penetration of his alleged victim Carroll—this is what the civil jury what the jury found proven by a preponderance of the evidence–could be called a rape. In that case, the judge wrote, 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…makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.” Because New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance,” the judge concluded, it can be fairly said that the jury found that Trump had raped Caroll according to the general understanding of what the word describes, though not under the New York Penal Law definition.

Of course, George had an obligation to explain this to his audience if he wanted to do his job, which is supposedly journalism though he clearly sees it as acting as a shill for progressives and the Democratic Party. Unethical and manipulative fake journalism, however, isn’t a crime, and usually can’t support defamation law suits, particularly if the victim of tainted reporting is Donald Trump. Thus George’s hit job on Trump (and Mace) was disgusting and unforgivable, but also effectively immune from legal attack…except for #7 in the list.

In that sentence, George slipped up. He said that Trump had been found “guilty” of committing rape. That is untrue as a matter of language and law.

Again, this is something the public doesn’t understand, but it is an important distinction. My one and probably only experience serving on a jury (yes, I know I have related this before) in medical malpractice case made this vividly clear. Until I corrected them and explained the crucial difference, my fellow jurors were ready to find the doctor defendant liable because he was obviously “guilty” of malpractice. Guilty, however, in a legal context is a term of art; to be officially “guilty,” which only applies to crimes, one must be found so by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Trump was not found guilty of rape; in fact, he was never charged with or tried for rape. If George had said that O.J. Simpson “has been found guilty of doing” a double murder, most of the ABC audience would have known he was wrong: we saw O.J. being declared “not guilty” of those crimes. He was, however, found liable for them, under the lesser standard of proof applied in civil trials. George Stephanopoulos would never say that about Simpson, but then the news media, Democrats and “the resistance” hate Donald Trump much more than they hate double murderers.

Will that one single defamatory statement be enough to nail ABC and the Clintons’ errand boy guilty of defaming Donald Trump? Probably not.