ABC News will award $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle defamation lawsuit

ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll.

According to settlement documents made public on Saturday, ABC will also post a note on its website expressing its regret about the claim in a March 10 segment on Stephanopoulos’ website. this week program and paid $1 million in legal fees to Trump’s lawyers.

“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit according to the terms contained in the court filing,” ABC News said in a statement.

Trump sued Stephanopoulos and ABC for defamation days after the broadcaster claimed during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, that Trump had been “found responsible for rape,” which misstated the rulings in Carroll’s two lawsuits. Against him.

Last year, Trump was convicted of sexual assault and defamation of Carroll, and was ordered to pay her $5 million. In January, he was found guilty of an additional charge of defamation and ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million. Trump is appealing both rulings.

Neither ruling included a finding of rape as defined under New York law.

The judge in both cases, Lewis Kaplan, said the jury’s conclusion was that Carroll failed to prove that Trump raped her “within the narrow technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Code.”

Kaplan noted that the definition of rape was “much narrower” than how rape is defined in common modern language, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal codes and elsewhere.

The judge said the ruling did not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people normally understand the word ‘rape’. In fact… the jury found that Mr. Trump did just that.”