U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said that he intends to sue further media outlets after winning a defamation settlement against ABC News on Saturday.
Speaking at a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump said that he intended to pursue legal claims against journalists and platforms ranging from the Des Moines Register to the Pulitzer Prizes.
“I think you have to do it because they’re very dishonest,” he said. “We need a great media. We need a fair media. It’s very important.”
Trump alluded to J. Ann Selzer’s final pre-election poll in Iowa that had Vice President Kamala Harris leading in the state despite Trump’s eventual victory there by 13 points.
“It was fraud and it was election interference,” Trump said. “She’s gotten me right always. She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing.”
Trump added that he would file the suit against the Des Moines Register and Selzer “today or tomorrow.”
On Saturday, Trump secured a $15 million settlement from ABC News after the network’s anchor George Stephanopoulos falsely claimed in an interview in March that Trump had been found liable for rape in a civil suit filed by the author E. Jean Carroll.
Juries have awarded Carroll tens of millions of dollars of Trump’s money after finding him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but not for rape, over her claims that Trump assaulted her in the mid-1990s at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City.
Trump’s legal team appealed one of the verdicts before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in September, where a ruling is pending.
According to the settlement with ABC News, the network will donate $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum. The network and Stephanopoulos also appended a statement to the original interview saying they “regret” the comments, and Trump will receive an additional $1 million in legal fees. Stephanopoulos also deactivated his social media account on X, where he had 2.3 million followers, though that was not one of the terms of the settlement.
Proving defamation against a public figure in the United States is notoriously difficult and requires proof not only that the statement against the figure is false but also that the person or organization making the statement did so with “actual malice” and either knew the statement to be false or recklessly disregarded whether it could be false.
In a July ruling rejecting a motion from ABC to dismiss the case, a judge wrote that the lawsuit against the network hinged on “whether it is substantially true to say a jury (or juries) found (Trump) liable for rape by a jury despite the jury’s verdict expressly finding he was not liable for rape.”
It is less clear whether any such factual dispute exists for some of the other media grudges that Trump described on Monday, including his efforts to sue CBS and “60 Minutes” over the latter’s decision not to release the transcript of a pre-election interview with Harris.
“They took Kamala’s answer, which was a crazy answer, a horrible answer, and they took the whole answer out and they replaced it with something else she said later on in the interview,” Trump stated. “That was fraud and election interference by their news magazine, a big part of CBS News.”
“I feel I have to do this,” Trump added about the lawsuits. “I shouldn’t really be the one to do it. It should have been the Justice Department or somebody else, but I have to do it. It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press. Our press is very corrupt.”