ABC settles Donald Trump defamation lawsuit with $15M

NEW YORK CITY –

ABC News has agreed to pay US$15 million toward Donald Trump’s U.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 raping writer E. Jean Carroll.

According to settlement documents made public Saturday, ABC will also post a note on its website expressing regret over the claim in a March 10 segment on Stephanopoulos’ “This Week” program and pay US $1 million in legal fees to Trump’s lawyer.

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

Trump sued Stephanopoulos and ABC for defamation days after the anchor claimed during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., that Trump had been “found liable for rape,” which misstated the verdicts in Carroll’s two lawsuits against him.

Last year, Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll and was ordered to pay her US$5 million. In January, he was found liable on additional defamation claims and ordered to pay Carroll US$83.3 million. Trump is appealing both verdicts.

Neither verdict involved a finding of rape as defined under New York law.

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

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

The judge said the verdict did not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed … the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”