Trump tries to SLAPP away a lawsuit. The judge should make him pay for that. | Opinion
Donald Trump really likes playing the victim. He gets to do it again in this defamation case.
Donald Trump, now the president-elect, has spent 35 years demonizing five Black and Latino men who as teenagers were wrongfully convicted for a pair of attacks and a rape in New York's Central Park in 1989.
It doesn't matter to Trump that those convictions were vacated in 2002. He was indignant when New York in 2014 paid the "Exonerated Five" $41 million to settle a lawsuit, with an admission from the city that called it "a moral obligation to right this injustice."
Trump wanted them held accountable 35 years ago and still talks that way about them now, long after their names have been cleared. The flip side to that – Trump now insists he can't be held accountable for what he says about them.
Trump on Tuesday asked a federal judge to set in motion the process to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the five men after he made obviously false claims about them during the Sept. 10 presidential debate.
And he's using a Pennsylvania law specifically designed to prevent wealthy and powerful people from filing frivolous but expensive lawsuits to drain the resources of critics as a way of silencing them. Those are known as "strategic lawsuits against public participation," or SLAPP suits.
The Pennsylvania legislator who helped strengthen his state's anti-SLAPP suit law this year told me Trump is trying to apply it here in exactly the opposite way that it was intended to be used.
Trump's lawyer ignores what he said about 'Central Park Five'
Karin Sweigart, Trump's lawyer in the defamation case, cited the anti-SLAPP suit law in a letter to the judge while calling the complaint against him "legally insufficient and meritless."
She also shrugged off Trump's rhetoric about the men as "decades-old commentary," ignoring all the things he has said about them in the years between 1989 and now.
That's a way of trying to stake a claim for "protected public expression," the legal theory that Trump has "immunity" from accountability for things he says during a political debate.
The letter also dismisses Trump's false claim during the debate that the men pleaded guilty – they all pleaded not guilty at trial – as a "minor distinction" because four of the five gave statements that their lawyers called "contradictory, unreliable and inconsistent" after "hours of interrogation" by police in 1989. The four recanted those statements at trial.
The letter skips right over Trump's false claim from the debate stage that the men "killed a person, ultimately." Nobody died in the Central Park violence at the center of that accusation.
Sweigart told me she couldn't speak to Trump's history of rhetorical attacks on these men and was only focused on what he said from the debate stage. And the attorney said his status as a billionaire who is about to again become one of the most powerful people on the planet doesn't change his rights under the anti-SLAPP suit law.
“The First Amendment applies equally to everyone regardless of their socioeconomic status,” Sweigart said.
Is Trump misusing law meant to protect system from the rich?
Pennsylvania state Rep. Ryan Bizzarro, a Democrat from Erie, has a very different take on that. He was surprised to see his anti-SLAPP suit law cited by Trump in federal court.
“I championed this legislation because, truly, I was tired of the legal system being abused by the elites and the powerful," Bizzarro told me. "However, this law does not stop the rich and powerful from trying to abuse the legal system. And that is what Donald Trump is, yet again, trying to do. He's trying to dodge responsibility, and this is proof of that.”
Bizzarro introduced the legislation last year to expand the state's anti-SLAPP suit law, which since 2000 had only offered that kind of protection in cases involving environmental law and regulations. It was signed into law in July after passing unanimously in the state Democratically controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate.
The law allows for a "pretrial motion" to be filed by a defendant to short-circuit and dismiss a case if a judge agrees that it is a SLAPP suit. That's what Trump is trying to do now.
“The law is very clear that it does not protect people who slander others," Bizzarro said. "The SLAPP motion only protects those who are exercising their free speech rights on a matter of public interest."
Trump returns to White House by again escaping accountability
The Exonerated Five – Antron Brown (formerly known as Antron McCray), Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise – deserve better from a politician who is about to move back into the White House.
But that would require Trump to accept responsibility for something he got terribly wrong in a pathetic bid for attention 35 years ago.
He didn't have the character to act that way back then. He doesn't have it now. Instead, he's asking a judge to tell the world he can't be held accountable for the things he says and the harm that causes.
Trump's attorney noted in her letter that Pennsylvania's anti-SLAPP suit law "mandates an award of attorney's fees and costs" if a judge determines that the defamation case is a SLAPP suit.
But the law also has a SLAPP-back provision, which means a judge could make Trump pay the Exonerated Five's attorney fees and costs if it's ruled that Trump's legal maneuver is the "frivolous" act here. There's a pretrial hearing in the case set for Dec. 5.
If Trump can't accept accountability, then make him pay for it with money. The judge here should let the defamation case continue and dock Trump a pile of cash for trying to play the victim when he is everything but.
Follow Paste BN elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan