Cannibal Error: Anti-Film Propaganda and the ‘Video Nasties’ Panic of the 1980s

David Kerekes and David Slater’s Killing for Culture, the definitive history of real death on screen, is one of the most extraordinary film books ever written. They followed it with See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy, a comprehensive account of the ‘video nasty’ phenomenon, published in 2000. Both books have since been expanded and updated, more than twenty years later: a new edition of Killing for Culture appeared in 2016, and a second edition of See No Evil was released last month, retitled Cannibal Error: Anti-Film Propaganda and the ‘Video Nasties’ Panic of the 1980s.

‘Video nasty’ was a pejorative coined by the UK press in the early 1980s, when violent horror movies were released uncensored due to a lack of regulation over the emerging videocassette industry. After a campaign by the tabloids, police began charging video distributors under the Obscene Publications Act, and a list of thirty-nine actionable films was compiled by the Director of Public Prosecutions. In 1984, legislation was introduced requiring certification of all videos by the British Board of Film Classification.

See No Evil was the only book to cover every aspect of the ‘video nasties’ controversy: the films themselves, the moral panic whipped up by the media, the police prosecutions, the debate surrounding the influence of film violence, and state censorship of films on videotape. There have been other books on the subject—notably the academic study The Video Nasties, edited by Martin Barker; and John Martin’s chronology of press coverage, The Seduction of the Gullible—but See No Evil told the full story for the first time.

The second edition, Cannibal Error, is just as exhaustive, and is almost 200 pages longer than See No Evil. It features new interviews with senior BBFC staff, an updated catalogue of banned videos, and a more detailed guide to the current availability of the original ‘video nasty’ films. The new title—which will take some getting used to—is a pun on the film Cannibal Terror (Terreur cannibale), and a reference to the misinformation surrounding the ‘video nasties’.

Kerekes also edited the influential counter-culture journal Headpress, and his other books include Sex, Murder, Art (a monograph on director Jörg Buttgereit). Jake West (Video Nasties) and David Gregory (Ban the Sadist Videos!) have both made ‘video nasty’ documentaries, and the Monthly Film Bulletin (vol. 51, no. 610) published an analysis of the DPP’s list by Julian Petley and Kim Newman.

This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like: Perspectives on the SlutWalk Movement

In 2011, the first SlutWalk was held in Toronto, launching a feminist campaign to assert female sexual autonomy and reclaim the epithet ‘slut’. In a Guardian op-ed published a few weeks later (9th May 2011), Gail Dines and Wendy J. Murphy argued that the SlutWalk movement was fighting a lost cause: “The term slut is so deeply rooted in the patriarchal “madonna/whore” view of women’s sexuality that it is beyond redemption. The word is so saturated with the ideology that female sexual energy deserves punishment that trying to change its meaning is a waste of precious feminist resources.”

Writing in The Daily Telegraph (12th May 2011), Germaine Greer supported the SlutWalkers, though she cautioned that it is “difficult, probably impossible, to reclaim a word that has always been an insult.” (And she should know, having attempted a similar reappropriation of the c-word in the 1970s.) Greer pointed out that, although ‘slut’ has always been a pejorative, it previously referred to slovenly women rather than promiscuous ones: “Yes, I am a slut. My house could be cleaner. My sheets could be whiter. I could be without sexual fantasies too—pure as the untrodden snow—but I’m not. I’m a slut and proud.”

Katharine Whitehorn was the first feminist to confront slut-shaming and reappropriate ‘slut’ as a positive term. Writing sixty years ago in The Observer (29th December 1963), she self-identified as a slut in the word’s original sense: “Have you ever taken anything back out of the dirty-clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?... Honest answers should tell you, once and for all, whether you are one of us: the miserable, optimistic, misunderstood race of sluts.”

This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like: Perspectives on the SlutWalk Movement, edited by Alyssa Teekah, Erika Jane Scholz, May Friedman, and Andrea O’Reilly, was published in 2015. It includes a chapter by Nancy Effinger Wilson, Dirty Talk, an excellent cultural history of ‘slut’. The book also features yes i am a slut (written entirely in lower-case) by Clementine Morrigan, who proudly (but unconvincingly) proclaims herself a slut in the sexual sense: “yes i am a feminist and yes i am intelligent and yes i do choose to say yes i am a slut.”

Censor Must Die

It’s fair to say that Ing Kanjanavanit has had her battles with the film censors. In an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored, she described the state censorship board as “a bunch of trembling morons with the power of life and death over our films.” Two of her films were banned in Thailand—My Teacher Eats Biscuits (คนกราบหมา) in 1998, and Shakespeare Must Die (เชคสเปียร์ต้องตาย) in 2012—though both bans have recently been lifted, and the films will be screened later this year.

Ing’s documentary Censor Must Die (เซ็นเซอร์ต้องตาย) shows producer Manit Sriwanichpoom receiving the censor’s initial verdict on Shakespeare Must Die, and follows him as he appeals against the ban at the Ministry of Culture and files a case with the Office of the National Human Rights Commission. (The documentary was made in 2013, though it was another decade before the ban was finally revoked, following a judgement by the Supreme Court.)

Censor Must Die’s most revealing scene takes place at the headquarters of the Ministry of Culture: in the lobby, a TV plays a video demonstrating the traditional Thai method of sitting in a polite and respectful manner. The video encapsulates the Ministry’s didactic and outdated interpretation of Thai culture, and it was parodied by the mock instructional video “How to Behave Elegantly Like a Thai” in Sorayos Prapapan’s film Arnold Is a Model Student (อานนเป็นนักเรียนตัวอย่าง).

The documentary premiered at the Freedom on Film (สิทธิหนังไทย) seminar in 2013, was shown a few months later at the Thai Film Archive, and had private screenings at Silpakorn University and the Friese-Greene Club. It was last shown at Cinema Oasis, the cinema Ing and Manit founded in Bangkok, on 20th March 2020. Censor Must Die returns to Cinema Oasis this week, screening on 3rd, 4th, 5th, 10th, and 11th May.

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards, published earlier this year, contains storyboards and production illustrations from some of Hitchcock’s most famous films, including classics such as Vertigo. But the main attraction of Tony Lee Moral’s book is its chapter on Psycho, with a four-page spread of storyboards by Saul Bass. Although some of the Bass drawings have been reproduced elsewhere, Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards includes more than 100 of them, some of which are previously unpublished.

The Bass storyboards for the Psycho shower scene are “undoubtedly the most widely discussed sequence in the history of storyboarding,” according to Chris Pallant and Steven Price in their book Storyboarding, which includes a chapter on Hitchcock’s storyboards. Cinefantastique magazine (vol. 16, no. 4–5) printed a set of shower scene storyboards, and the same sketches appeared on the cover of Fionnuala Halligan’s book The Art of Movie Storyboards.

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards doesn’t address the authorship controversy surrounding the shower scene. Bass claimed that he not only storyboarded the sequence, but also directed it, though this was refuted by Psycho’s cast and crew. Cinefantastique challenged the Bass claim (in an article by Stephen Rebello), though Jennifer Bass and Pat Kirkham endorsed it in their book Saul Bass.

Once Upon a Time at Sanamluang...

Preecha Raksorn’s Once Upon a Time at Sanamluang... opened yesterday at VS Gallery in Bangkok, and runs until 23rd June. The exhibition explores the 6th October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University from two opposite perspectives: revisionist history and state propaganda. Like (too) many other artists responding to the massacre, Preecha focuses on the famous photograph by Neal Ulevich of a vigilante preparing to hit a hanged man with a folding chair.

Last year, Preecha created A Long Time Ago at..., a large, brightly coloured painting based on Ulevich’s black-and-white photo. The painting reproduces the original image meticulously, with one exception: the noose around the dead man’s neck is missing. This omission, which effectively brings the victim back to life, hints at the revisionist nature of the exhibition.

Preecha reproduced his painting as a line drawing on A4 paper, and gave copies to sixteen people representing a range of ages and occupations, asking them to colour in the drawing in their own styles. With this series, Let’s Color, the artist sought to discover people’s attitudes towards the massacre, and the extent of their knowledge about it, given that Thai school textbooks make only minimal reference to the event.

Of the the sixteen Let’s Color respondents, only five added the missing noose to their illustrations, suggesting that the state’s suppression of information about the event has been successful. One person, Kwanchai Sinpru, ignored the lines of Preecha’s template and instead overlaid his own paintings of the incendiary media coverage that led to the massacre: a จัตุรัส (‘square’) magazine interview with the monk Kittivuddho Bhikku (29th June 1976), and a Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) newspaper headline. The most creative response was by Apisit Sitsuntiea, who cut out the drawing to create a paper sculpture in the shape of a crown.

To demonstrate how the massacre is whitewashed by the national curriculum, the exhibition includes a reproduction of a passage from a history textbook that makes only fleeting references to the event. The page (History Lesson of October 6th) has been placed on a lectern, behind which are three framed paintings of massacre victims (Hang Me, Oh Hang Me). This installation resembles a traditional classroom, although in Thai classrooms the three frames would hold portraits of kings and queens instead.

The exhibition was inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s film Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, in which Tarantino rewrites the Manson Family murder of actress Sharon Tate, creating a fictional happy ending in which Tate survives and Manson’s followers are killed. Preecha uses similar dramatic licence, drawing a comic strip of twenty-six panels, Once Upon a Time at..., in which the hanged man removes the noose from his neck, fights back against the vigilante, and escapes.

Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room

Liz Truss is, by a country mile, the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister in history, in office for only forty-nine days. The Economist magazine (15th October 2022) calculated that the Truss premiership had “roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce”, and the Daily Star newspaper proved that an actual lettuce could stay fresh throughout her entire term of office. (Harry Cole and James Healey wrote an excellent Truss biography, Out of the Blue.)

Truss has written a new memoir, Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room (subtitled Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment in the US). But it’s not a conventional account of her premiership: “I do not see it as simply a chance to tell the detailed inside story of my time in government and justify every decision I made while I was there.” (Similarly, Theresa May wrote that her book was “not an attempt to justify certain decisions I made in office or to provide a detailed retelling of historical events.”)

Instead, Truss expresses her grievances about everything from the trivial (why would nobody help her book a haircut?) to the critical (why did economic institutions oppose her reckless fiscal policies?). Apparently, nothing was her fault: even though she asked Jeremy Hunt to become Chancellor before informing her close friend Kwasi Kwarteng that he was being sacked, she blames a leaker for revealing Hunt’s appointment on Twitter, where a shocked Kwarteng read about his replacement.

Summarising her premiership, Truss writes: “Things did not work out as I had hoped. My time in Downing Street was brief, and I did not have the chance to deliver the policies I had planned.” That first sentence brings to mind Hirohito’s famous understatement, when his country surrendered in 1945: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

My Teacher Eats Biscuits

Ing Kanjanavanit’s film My Teacher Eats Biscuits will finally be shown in Thailand, more than twenty-five years after it was banned. Ing re-edited the film in 2020, and this director’s cut—ten minutes shorter than the original version—was approved by the film censorship board last October. It will go on general release on 16th May. Although its Thai title (คนกราบหมา) remains the same, its English title has been changed to the less ambiguous Dog God.

My Teacher Eats Biscuits was banned from the inaugural Bangkok Film Festival in 1998, along with the Singaporean drama Bugis Street (妖街皇后). On the opening night of the Alternative Love Film Festival later that year, Ing showed a video of her meeting with the film censors, and screened Bugis Street in defiance of the ban. Police raided the Saeng-Arun Arts Centre during the screening of Bugis Street, though they left the auditorium once they realised that My Teacher Eats Biscuits was not being shown.

The film was banned on the grounds that it satirised religion. As the director explained in an interview for Thai Cinema Uncensored: “This is like banning John Waters’ Pink Flamingos for bad taste!” In other words, the religious satire was the whole point of the film. (In that interview, Ing alleged that one member of the censorship board, a Chulalongkorn University professor, dominated the board and led the decision to ban the film. Another possible reason for the ban was that the censors misinterpreted a character as an impersonation of Princess Galyani.)

Like Pink Flamingos, My Teacher Eats Biscuits is a low-budget, independent movie shot on 16mm. (Coincidentally, Pink Flamingos was also passed by the Thai censors last year.) A plot synopsis—a cult worships an evil dog, and a monk advocates necrophilia—gives the false impression that My Teacher Eats Biscuits is offensive or blasphemous. In fact, the film has a camp sensibility (which it shares with Pink Flamingos), and its tone is clearly parodic.

After the ban, My Teacher Eats Biscuits was rarely seen, either in Thailand or elsewhere. As critic Graiwoot Chulpongsathorn wrote in 2009, it is “a film so controversial that it has been ‘disappeared’ from history.” It was shown at the Goethe-Institut in Bangkok in 1998, and it had two European screenings in 2017: at the Close-Up Film Centre in London, and at the Cinéma du réel (‘cinema of the real’) festival in Paris.

When Shakespeare Must Die (เชคสเปียร์ต้องตาย) was banned in 2012, Ing had the dubious distinction of being the only Thai director with two films banned simultaneously. Now both films have been passed by the censors—the Shakespeare Must Die ban was lifted in February—and they will both return to Thai cinemas this year.

1974:The Best Year of the Movies

Next month, Bangkok’s Doc Club and Pub will begin a season of classics from 1974, which it describes as the best year of the movies. Of course, it’s debatable whether 1974 (now fifty years ago) was the greatest year in cinema history, but there’s no denying that the season includes some outstanding films. The Godfather II, Chinatown, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) will all be shown as part of 1974: The Best Year of the Movies.

Ali was previously screened at Doc Club and Pub in 2022, and at the Thai Film Archive earlier that year. The Godfather II was shown at the Scala cinema in 2018. Chinatown was shown at Smalls in 2018.

Nitade Movie ClubSalò

Even almost fifty years after it was released, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma) remains one of the most controversial films ever made. (When it was screened at London’s Compton Cinema Club in 1977, the venue was raided by the police, and even a censored print was seized by the vice squad two years later.) Salò will be shown at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Communication Arts on 17th April, as part of the Nitade Movie Club weekly screening programme.

Nitade Experimental Shorts: The Other Cinema

Weerapat Sakolvaree’s short film Nostalgia will be shown at Chulalongkorn University on 10th April at a screening organised by Nitade Movie Club. The event, Nitade Experimental Shorts: The Other Cinema, features two sessions—Deconstructing Emotions and Decolonized by Time—each lasting exactly 100 minutes. Nostalgia will open the second session. It has previously been shown at the Chiang Mai Film Festival (twice), Bangkok University, Future Fest 2023, Wildtype 2022, and the 26th Thai Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้นครั้งที่ 26).

Movie Night at Prince Theatre

Bangkok’s Prince Theatre continues its daily film screenings, Movie Night at Prince Theatre. Highlights this month include The Celebration (Festen), the first Dogme 95 production, on 19th April; and the Orson Welles masterpiece Citizen Kane on 25th April.

The Prince Theatre was established as a cinema in 1917, and was converted into a film-themed hotel a year after its centenary. Citizen Kane was previously shown at Bangkok Screening Room in 2017 and at Cinema Winehouse in 2018.

FIAF Congress 2024

Apiachtpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century (แสงศตวรรษ) will be screened in 35mm at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya on 21st April, as part of the FIAF Congress 2024. The event is organised by the International Federation of Film Archives, and the screening is in recognition of the director’s status as the first Thai recipient of an FIAF Award.

Syndromes and a Century was shown most recently at the Archive during the 23rd Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้นครั้งที่ 23), and it was also screened there earlier in 2019. The film’s censorship in Thailand sparked a campaign to reform Thai film regulation, as discussed in Thai Cinema Uncensored.

Outstanding!The Relief from Rodin to Picasso

Outstanding! The Relief from Rodin to Picasso, held last year in Frankfurt, was the first exhibition since 1980 to survey the modern history of relief sculptures. Its scholarly catalogue (edited by Alexander Eiling, Eva Mongi-Vollmer, and Karin Schick) is only the second English-language book on the subject, and the first—Relief Sculpture by L.R. Rogers—was published fifty years ago.

Outstanding! begins with an explanation of the three traditional categories of relief (bas-relief, haut-relief, and relief en creux), though the exhibition defined the relief more broadly: the impressive collection of works on display included examples of mixed-media assemblage and trompe-l’œil paintings. The catalogue was originally published in German as Herausragend! Das Relief von Rodin bis Picasso.

Show Me the Movies!Recommended by Martin Scorsese

Doc Club and Pub will show a short season of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films (as part of their Show Me the Movies! strand), including Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, starting later this month. 2001 will be shown on 25th and 28th April, and 4th May. It has previously been shown at Arcadia in 2022, at the Scala in 2017, and at the Thai Film Archive in 2013.

The Celebration Tour in Rio

Madonna will end her Celebration Tour, which began last year, with a concert on the beach at Copacabana in Rio on 4th May. The event will be broadcast live by the Brazilian TV channel Globo. (The Celebration Tour in Rio will be the first live TV transmission of a Madonna concert since HBO broadcast the Drowned World Tour in 2001.)

One of the highlights of the Celebration Tour came when Kylie Minogue joined Madonna on stage earlier this month to sing Can’t Get You Out of My Head. The set list was modified slightly at some venues: Madonna performed an a cappella version of Express Yourself on the American leg of the tour, she sang Sodade in Lisbon, and I Love New York in New York. On selected dates, she sang Frozen, Take a Bow, and a cover version of This Little Light of Mine. In Chicago, she performed This Used to Be My Playground live for the first time in her career.

Analogue: A Field Guide

“It’s only now the analogue world is effectively over that we can grasp its extraordinarily rich legacy,” writes Deyan Sudjic in the introduction to his new book Analogue: A Field Guide (published in the US as The World of Analog: A Visual Guide). Sudjic features 250 of “the most ingenious consumer artefacts ever produced,” gadgets made possible by the vacuum tube and the transistor, and rendered obsolete by the smartphone. (He cites the release of the iPhone as “a kind of mass extinction event for a vast range of analogue products”.)

Analogue includes numerous industrial design classics: the Polaroid SX-70 instant camera, the Sony TR-610 handheld radio, and the JVC RC-M90 boombox. There are devices made from Bakelite (the Ericsson DBH 1001 telephone) and plastic (the Panasonic Panapet portable radio), and once-familiar product ranges from former consumer technology giants like Sony (Walkman, Watchman, and Handycam) and Kodak (Brownie and Instamatic). Each product is beautifully photographed against a white background, and the images are so clear that the buttons and dials are all legible.

Some of the featured objects also appear in the Phaidon Design Classics series, and in design histories by Charlotte and Peter Fiell (Design of the 20th Century, A–Z of Design and Designers, Plastic Dreams, and Industrial Design A–Z). A History of Industrial Design (by Edward Lucie-Smith) features a chapter on consumer technology, and Extinct (which includes an essay by Sudjic) and Essential Retro (by James B. Grahame) also cover vintage devices, though Analogue is the first book to feature such an extensive guide to analogue design and technology.

Doc Club Festival Selections 04

Doc Club and Pub will show further highlights from this year’s Doc Club Festival, as part of the Selections series. Selections 04, on 31st March, includes Napasin Samkaewcham’s short film A Love Letter to My Sister, a deeply moving documentary about the volatile relationship between his parents. A Love Letter to My Sister was previously shown in the Short Film Marathon 27 (หนังสั้นมาราธอน 27), and at the 27th Short Film and Video Festival (เทศกาลภาพยนตร์สั้นครั้งที่ 27).

Kubrick:An Odyssey

Two rival biographies of Stanley Kubrick were published almost simultaneously in 1997. John Baxter and Vincent LoBrutto’s books were both unauthorised accounts, though LoBrutto’s was considerably more accurate than Baxter’s. They are now joined by a third major Kubrick biography, Nathan Abrams and Robert P. Kolker’s Kubrick: An Odyssey, which was released earlier this year.

The previous biographies were published before the release of Eyes Wide Shut—the subject of another Abrams and Kolker book—making Kubrick the first biography to cover the director’s entire career. Kubrick has the same strengths and weaknesses as their Eyes Wide Shut book: impressive research, some questionable opinions, and imprecise referencing. (The authors previously dismissed that film’s state of incompletion at the time of Kubrick’s death as “ultimately irrelevant”, though in their biography they take it more seriously, calling it “the most serious controversy of Kubrick’s career”.)

Kubrick is particularly significant as the first biography based on material from the Kubrick Archive, making it more reliable than its predecessors. When Kolker and Abrams occasionally veer into speculation, though (“perhaps...”), they are on shakier ground, and their regular references to the significance of Kubrick’s Jewish identity (a thesis developed by Abrams) feel extraneous.

Kolker and Abrams are also the first Kubrick biographers to receive cooperation from the director’s family. The book benefits substantially from this level of access, but it’s also a double-edged sword: Kubrick’s brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, who acted as a liason, sometimes attempted to steer the authors in directions that contradicted their own research. (All the writers can do is to ask rhetorically, “as with so much in Kubrick’s life, which version is true?”)

The biography has a bibliography and a comprehensive index, but there are no footnotes, and quotes often appear in the text without attribution. This makes it needlessly difficult to identify the sources of quotations, beyond those that are familiar from other publications. (Kubrick joins more than sixty other Kubrick books on the Dateline Bangkok bookshelves.)

High Voltage x Speech Odd

Speech Odd’s second album is out now on cassette and CD (limited to fifty copies of each format), with an LP release to follow later this year (limited to 100 copies). The album is a collaboration with High Voltage, and each band has contributed four songs.

Advertisement, the standout track from Speech Odd, is about state propaganda: “lying to gain power... you must be punished by people!” High Voltage’s lyrics are even more political: their tracks criticise an unnamed leader who falsely compares himself to a Buddhist deity. Seek the Power is written from his perspective: “i seek the power (power to rule)” [sic], and No Perfect Man accuses him of “pretending to be god”.

Speech Odd’s debut album was Oddworld, and they have also released the EP Promo 2022 and the single Control. Their merchandise includes a Die mo cracy t-shirt released earlier this year, a reference to the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in 2010.

High Voltage released their EP Watching You on CD in 2019. Its title track is a satirical cover of Every Breath You Take, with the lyrics adapted to comment on state surveillance: “Be careful of what you do / Thai junta is watching you”. The music video for Vicious Circle, another track on the EP, includes newsreel footage of the 6th October 1976 massacre.

“You don’t find it offensive that Donald Trump has been found liable for rape?”

Donald Trump has filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News and George Stephanopoulos, after Stephanopoulos asked Republican politician Nancy Mace why she had endorsed Trump as a presidential candidate despite Trump having been “found liable for rape.” Stephanopoulos interviewed Mace on The Week, in a segment broadcast on 10th March.

Stephanopoulos began the interview with a reference to a civil prosecution in which Trump was found guilty of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll: “You’ve endorsed Donald Trump for president. Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury. Donald Trump has been found liable for defaming the victim of that rape. It’s been affirmed by a judge.”

Mace, who is herself a rape victim, stated that she found the premise of the interview “disgusting.” Stephanopoulos again asked her to justify her endorsement of Trump: “I’m asking a question about why you endorsed someone who’s been found liable for rape.” Mace accused Stephanopoulos of victim-shaming her, and Stephanopoulos attempted to clarify: “I’m questioning your political choices, because you’re supporting someone who’s been found liable for rape.”

Stephanopoulos then pressed Mace again to answer his initial question: “why are you supporting someone who’s been found liable for rape?” She replied that the question was offensive, to which Stephanopoulos responded: “You don’t find it offensive that Donald Trump has been found liable for rape?”

Mace’s answers, and Trump’s libel claim, hinge on the fact that Trump was convicted of sexually assaulting Carroll, rather than raping her. Trump’s lawsuit quotes Stephanopoulos on previous broadcasts referring to sexual assault, in an attempt to prove that Stephanopoulos was aware of the distinction and had used the word ‘rape’ in the Mace interview either recklessly or maliciously.

Trump also sued Carroll for the same reason, after she accused him of rape despite the sexual assault conviction. That lawsuit was dismissed, however, as the judge in the sexual assault case issued a written clarification: “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... the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

Unlike the recent interview with Mace, the previous references by Stephanopoulos to sexual assault were all made prior to 19th July 2023, when the judge’s clarification was published. Stephanopoulos was thus using the term ‘rape’ “as many people commonly understand the word”, meaning that yesterday’s lawsuit against Stephanopoulos and ABC will almost certainly be dismissed.