Former President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit alleging ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos defamed him during an interview last month when the TV host said Trump was found liable for rape.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Miami. It names ABC, ABC News and Stephanopoulos as defendants. Trump is seeking a jury trial and unspecified punitive damages, court costs and other relief the court “deems just and proper.”

ABC News has not replied to an email from Spectrum News seeking comment.

The suit alleges Stephanopoulos made the false claim several times "with malice or with a reckless disregard for the truth" during a March 10 interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos."

In the interview, Stephanopoulos pressed the congresswoman, a rape survivor, about how she could justify endorsing Trump for president despite that “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming a victim of that rape.”

In May 2023, a New York jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s and defaming her after she went public with the accusation in 2019. The jury, however, found Trump not liable for rape, which she had alleged. 

The former president was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million. Trump, who denies the allegations, is appealing the verdict.

In a separate defamation case in January, a jury order Trump to pay Carroll an additional $83.3 million, which he is also appealing. That case, however, only considered the defamation claim, not rape or sexual abuse. Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled the jury’s verdict in the first Carroll case would apply to the second trial, leaving the second jury only to decide damages. Trump is also appealing that verdict.

Trump’s lawyers argue Stephanopoulos’ false claims were made more than 10 times in the Mace interview. The exchange was broadcast to millions and then picked up by other media outlets and spread on social media, they noted.

Stephanopoulos is aware of the truth, the lawsuit claims, pointing to previous statements he made on the air. Trump’s representatives contacted ABC News demanding a retraction of the interview and an apology, but ABC only changed a headline of a related article to say “sexual assault” instead of “rape,” the suit says.

Mace sought to correct Stephanopoulos in their interview, saying Trump “was not found guilty … in a criminal court of law. It was a civil. It was sexual abuse. It wasn’t actually rape, by the way.”

Stephanopoulos then defended himself, citing a July 2023 Washington Post article that reported on Kaplan’s response to a motion related to Trump’s appeal. Kaplan wrote that Carroll “failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law” but that “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 below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that,” the judge wrote.

Trump’s lawsuit was filed on the same day his lawyers told a different New York judge the former president could not secure a bond to appeal the $464 million civil fraud judgment against him after he was found liable for fraudulently inflating his net worth in order to secure more favorable business loans.