Trump, staff, and surrogates are illegally defaming private individuals accusing Trump of assault
Not a defamation specialist, but -
Falsely labeling people as liars in public media is an obvious damage to their reputation, so the only remaining question is whether the people calling these women liars had any obligation to look for the truth before they made the statements. I'll assume here they did one of two things: no investigation at all/just started calling the women liars, or that they asked Trump in general if anything like this happened and he said no.
Proving defamation against a public figure is hard, you have to go beyond being stupid or incompetent in your attack. Defamation against private figures means the lower bar of negligence - if you did not meet a reasonable standard of care in making your statement, then you've committed defamation. Doing no research at all before make false claims is clearly defamatory against private figures (and I think probably against public figures too); doing only a little research is a gray area.
Some of Trump's accusers are undoubtedly private figures (woman on the plane, the staffer in his office building). Some are more borderline (the journalist, the beauty pageant contestant), but even the borderline ones aren't public political/mass media figures. Regardless, the negligence standard applies in at least some cases.
I think a cursory question to Trump: "Did you ever do this stuff? No? Great, we're just going to call them all liars no matter the number of accusers, their details, or their personal credibility" isn't enough to be non-negligent. There was plenty of information indicating otherwise prior to the Trump-Billy tape, plus the tape, plus each credible accusation afterwards in sequence, all making the blanket claim that all the women are liars to be defamatory.
The ones who should be suing for defamation aren't Trump and his ludicrous threat to the NY Times, it's these women against Trump, the campaign, his staffers possibly, and definitely his surrogates for lying about them.
The barrier against winning is the he said/she said nature of the claim, but discovery and relative credibility of Trump and his accusers can put that to the test.
Legally you'd want to wait to get your ducks lined up. Politically it would be great to get the complaints filed ASAP.
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