Donald Trump’s ‘Clownish’ Lawsuit Mocked by Attorney

Former President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against ABC News was mocked on Friday by attorney Lisa Needham who scolded it as “clownish” and “doomed to fail.”

Earlier this week, Trump sued ABC, ABC News and This Week host George Stephanopoulos, claiming that Stephanopoulos made repeated false claims earlier this month that a jury had found the former president liable for “raping” Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s.

Trump, the presumed GOP presidential nominee in the 2024 election, was ordered in January to pay $83.3 million to Carroll, a former Elle columnist, for damaging her reputation after she accused him of sexually assaulting her during an incident in the 1990s. In May 2023, a separate jury awarded Carroll $5 million from Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in those cases and vowed to appeal them.

Stephanopoulos made the remarks on the March 10 episode of This Week while questioning Republican South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace, a rape survivor, on why she is still supporting Trump for the presidency after “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape.”

In a column published on Friday on her Public Notice page titled, “Trump’s lawsuit against ABC is not the flex he thinks it is,” Needham, an attorney at Haugen Law Group in Minneapolis, wrote that “there are a few reasons this lawsuit seems likely to crash and burn.”

Needham called it a “dubious splitting of legal hairs, particularly as the judge in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit already clarified that Trump was indeed found liable for rape in the way the term is commonly understood.”

Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw the civil defamation trial, has since written in two separate filings that despite not being found liable by the civil jury of rape under the New York Penal Law, which does not categorize rape in criminal prosecutions as digital penetration, the former president committed the act under a broader definition defined in other states.

Needham continued in her column, “The final, inescapable problem for Trump is that to prevail in this lawsuit, there will be discovery, and Trump would have to sit for a deposition and go on the stand. As the plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit, rather than a defendant, he’d be required to show up for trial and testify under oath.”

Mace and Stephanopoulos sparred for nearly six minutes regarding her support for Trump’s presidency amid Carroll’s lawsuit and jury decision.

Mace contended, on several occasions, that the case was “not a criminal court case.” The congresswoman also corrected Stephanopoulos about the fact that Trump was not found liable for rape.

“It was not a criminal court case, number one,” said Mace, who has continued to take aim at Stephanopoulos and ABC News since the interview. “Number two, I live with shame. And you’re asking me a question about my political choices, trying to shame me as a rape victim and I find it disgusting.”

At the end of the contentious interview, Mace said that Stephanopoulos was being “offensive.” The ABC host then replied, “We’ll let the viewers decide about that.”

The crux of Trump’s lawsuit against ABC News is focused on Stephanopoulos suggesting Trump was twice found “liable” for rape, which neither jury did, and whether the host willfully made the false claims.

“These statements were and remain false, and were made by Defendant Stephanopoulos with actual malice or with a reckless disregard for the truth given that Defendant Stephanopoulos knows that these statements are patently and demonstrably false,” Trump attorney Alejandro Brito wrote in the lawsuit. “Indeed, the jury expressly found that Plaintiff did not commit rape and, as demonstrated below, Defendant George Stephanopoulos was aware of the jury’s finding in this regard yet still falsely stated otherwise.”

Newsweek reached out to Brito via email for comment. This story will be updated with any provided statements.

Needham, who is also an adjunct professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, wrote Friday that “simply showing the statement is false, which suffices when everyday people sue for defamation, isn’t enough in this instance.”

She continued: “Thanks to a 1964 case, New York Times v. Sullivan, politicians and other public figures who bring defamation cases are held to a higher standard of proof. Trump will need to prove ‘actual malice.’ That isn’t malice in the sense of maliciousness, but rather that Stephanopoulos either knew that he was lying about whether Trump was a rapist or that Stephanopoulos purposely failed to investigate whether Trump was indeed a rapist with an intent to avoid the truth.”

Newsweek also reached out to Needham for comment on Saturday afternoon via email.