ABC News settles  million with Trump over defamation lawsuit

ABC News settles $15 million with Trump over defamation lawsuit



CNN

ABC News will pay $15 million to a “presidential foundation and museum” as part of a settlement with President-elect Donald Trump in his defamation lawsuit against broadcaster and host George Stephanopoulos.

The settlement, publicly filed Saturday, shows the network will also pay $1 million toward Trump’s legal fees and apologize.

ABC News will issue the following statement as an Editor’s Note to the online article at the center of the lawsuit: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements about President Donald J. Trump made by George Stephanopoulos during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Representative Nancy Mace on ABC.” This week on March 10, 2024.”

“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit under the terms of the court docket,” an ABC News spokesperson wrote in a statement.

Trump filed the lawsuit in federal court in Florida earlier this year, arguing that Stephanopoulos and ABC News defamed him when the host said that 10 times during a controversial on-air interview with Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina in March a jury found that Trump “raped” E. Jean Carroll.

Carroll alleged that Trump raped her in a department store in the mid-1990s and defamed her when he denied her claim. Trump has denied any wrongdoing with Carroll.

In 2023, a jury concluded that Trump had sexually abused Carroll, which was enough to hold him liable for assault, although it did not find that Carroll had proven that he had raped her. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million for assault and defamation. In January, Carroll was awarded an additional $83.3 million in damages for defamatory statements made by Trump in which he disparaged her and denied her rape allegations.

When a judge dismissed Trump’s countersuit against Carroll in August 2023, he concluded that the allegation that Trump raped Carroll was “substantially true.” The judge wrote that Trump “raped” her in the broader sense of the word as people commonly understand it, although not in the narrow sense of New York state law.

In the lawsuit filed against ABC News in March, Trump claimed Stephanopoulos’ statements were “false, intentional, malicious and intended to cause harm.”

A judge in July refused to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit against the network, saying those definitions were different enough. He added that the case will be about “whether it is substantially true that a jury (or juries) found (Trump) guilty of rape by a jury (Trump), even though the jury in its verdict explicitly stated that he was not responsible for rape.”

The agreement came a day after a federal judge ruled that Trump and Stephanopoulos must sit together for a deposition sometime next week. The president-elect can now avoid testifying under oath, which might have brought legal risks if he returned to the White House.

Trump has filed lawsuits against the news media in the past. In late October, he filed a lawsuit against CBS seeking $10 billion in damages over the network’s “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. His legal counsel claimed the Harris interview and associated broadcast were “partisan and unlawful acts of election and electorate interference” designed to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the balance” in the presidential election to give in their favor.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN’s Brian Stelter, Marshall Cohen and Kaanita Iyer contributed to this report.

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