US broadcaster agrees to pay Trump $23m to settle defamation lawsuit
New York: US broadcaster ABC News has agreed to pay $US15 million ($23 million) toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
As part of the settlement made public Saturday, ABC News posted an editor’s note to its website expressing regret over Stephanopoulos’ statements during a March 10 segment on his This Week program. The network will also pay $US1 million ($1.57 million) in legal fees to the law firm of Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito.
President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance at a football game in Maryland on Saturday.Credit: AP
The settlement agreement describes ABC’s presidential library payment as a “charitable contribution”, with the money earmarked for a non-profit organisation that is being established in connection with the yet-to-be built library.
“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” ABC News spokeswoman Jeannie Kedas said.
A Trump spokesperson declined to comment.
Trump, Stephanopoulos and ABC executives signed the settlement agreement on Friday.
The document bore Trump’s bold, distinct signature and an electronic signature with the initials GRS in a space for Stephanopoulos’ name. Debra OConnell, the president of ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks, also e-signed the agreement.
ABC News This Week host George Stephanopoulos.Credit: Facebook
While sizeable, ABC’s contribution to Trump’s presidential library will likely cover just a fraction of the cost. Former president Barack Obama’s library in Chicago, for example, was estimated to cost $US830 million as of 2021.
Trump sued ABC and Stephanopoulos in Federal Court in Miami days after the network aired the segment, in which the longtime Good Morning America anchor repeatedly misstated the verdicts in Carroll’s two civil lawsuits against Trump.
During a live interview with Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, Stephanopoulos wrongly claimed that Trump had been “found liable for rape” and “defaming the victim of that rape”.
Neither verdict involved a finding of rape as defined under New York law.
In the first of the lawsuits to go to trial, Trump was found liable last year of sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll. A jury ordered him to pay her $US5 million.
In January, at a second trial in Federal Court in Manhattan, Trump was found liable on additional defamation claims and ordered to pay Carroll $US83.3 million.
Trump is appealing both verdicts.
E. Jean Carroll (centre) leaves court after being awarded damages in January.Credit: AP
Carroll, a former advice columnist, went public in a 2019 memoir with her allegation that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s at a luxury Manhattan department store across the street from Trump Tower, after they crossed paths at an entrance.
Trump denied her claim, saying he didn’t know Carroll and never ran into her at the store.
After Trump lashed out, calling Carroll a “nut job” who invented “a fraudulent and false story” to sell her memoir, she sued him for unspecified monetary damages and sought a retraction of what she said were Trump’s defamatory denials.
Testifying in April 2023, Carroll told jurors: “I’m here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and shattered my reputation, and I’m here to try and get my life back.”
Carroll testified that after she’d agreed to help Trump shop for a gift for a woman, he pushed her against a dressing room wall, stamped his mouth onto hers, yanked down her tights and shoved his hand and then his penis inside her while she struggled against him.
She said she finally kneed him off her and fled.
In upholding the $US5 million judgment in the first trial, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that the unanimous verdict was almost entirely in favour of Carroll, except that the jury concluded she had failed to prove that Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law”.
Kaplan, who presided over both of Carroll’s lawsuits against Trump, said the definition of rape in the state code was “far narrower” than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes and elsewhere.
Under New York law, a rape finding requires vaginal penetration by a penis. Forcible penetration without consent of the vagina or other bodily orifices by fingers or anything else is labelled “sexual abuse”.
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.”
AP
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