ABC News will pay Donald Trump $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit that the president-elect brought against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos in March.
The settlement, which was publicly filed in the Southern District of Florida Miami Division on Saturday, states that ABC will make a $15 million contribution to a “Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff” and pay $1 million in Trump’s attorney fees.
As part of the agreement, the defendants were also instructed to issue a statement of “regret” in an editor’s note for a March 10 segment of Stephanopoulos’s “This Week” program, in which the anchor made false statements that Trump had been found civilly liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll.
An ABC News spokesperson told The Washington Post, “We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing.” A spokesperson and lawyers for Trump did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Trump sued Stephanopoulos and ABC, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, for defamation on March 18 after the anchor claimed during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) that Trump had been found “liable for rape” — a misstatement of the verdicts in Carroll’s two lawsuits against him.
Last year, a Manhattan jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed Carroll, stopping short of saying he committed rape, which the writer had accused him of doing in the mid-1990s. Notably, a judge later filed a motion to clarify that the jury in Carroll’s case had determined that Trump’s abuse against her was rape, which has a “far narrower” definition in New York law.
“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 A. Kaplan wrote. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly pushed back against that characterization, culminating with their defamation suit against Stephanopoulos.
According to the complaint, Stephanopoulos asserted that Trump was “found liable for rape” more than 10 times during the course of the anchor’s interview with Mace. In the segment, Stephanopoulos asked why the lawmaker, who has spoken publicly about her own experience being raped as a teenager, would support Trump’s presidential campaign.
“Judges in two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming a victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony we just saw?” Stephanopoulos asked Mace.
“These statements were and remain false, and were made by the Defendant Stephanopoulos with actual malice or with a reckless disregard for the truth given that Defendant Stephanopoulos knows that these statements are patently and demonstrably false,” the lawsuit reads, while accusing ABC for “knowingly or recklessly” publishing the “false and disparaging” statements.
The settlement caps a highly litigious year for the president-elect.
In January, he was found liable on additional defamation claims against Carroll and ordered to pay her $83 million. Trump also faced criminal cases in Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C., and was found guilty on 34 felony counts by a Manhattan jury in May for falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to an adult-film actress.