ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos have reached a settlement with Donald Trump in his defamation suit
According to The Associated Press, ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library and an $1 million in legal fees to Trump’s lawyer.
The network also agreed to add an editors’ note to the bottom of the relevant article with the March 10 episode of Stephanopoulos’ “This Week” program.
“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” a spokesperson for ABC News said in a statement.
Trump sued Stephanopoulos and ABC for defamation after the anchor claimed during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., that Trump had been “found liable for rape.”
Writer E Jean Carroll alleged that Trump raped her in a department store in the mid-1990s and that he defamed her when he denied her claim.
In 2023, a jury found that Trump sexually abused her, sufficient to hold him liable for battery, though it did not find that Carroll proved he raped her. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million for batter and defamation.
In January, Carroll was awarded an additional $83.3 million in damages for his defamatory statements disparaging her and denying her rape allegations.
The jury did not find that Carroll proved Trump had raped her. Instead, a judge concluded months later when dismissing Trump’s countersuit against Carroll that the claim Trump raped Carroll was “substantially true.”
“The finding 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,’” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
