ABC News to give $15M 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 George Stephanopoulos’s wrongful assertion on air that the president-elect was found guilty of raping author E. Jean Carroll.

According to the settlement documents made public on Saturday, ABC will also post a note on its website expressing regret for the claim in the March 10 episode of Stephanopoulos’s. This week program and pay $1 million US in legal fees to Trump’s attorney.

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

Trump sued Stephanopoulos and ABC for defamation days after the anchor said during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, that Trump had been “convicted of rape,” which contradicted the verdict in two of Carroll’s cases.

Last year, Trump was found guilty of sexual harassment and defamation of Carroll and was ordered to pay her $5 million. In January, he was found guilty of other defamation claims and ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million. Trump is appealing both decisions.

Neither decision involved 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 definition of a certain section of the New York Penal Code.”

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

The judge said this decision does not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as most people often understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed … the judge found that Mr. Trump did just that.”