ABC News settles defamation suit with Trump for $15 million
By Paula Reid and Katelyn Polantz, CNN
(CNN) — ABC News will pay $15 million to a “presidential foundation and museum” in a settlement reached with President-elect Donald Trump in his defamation suit against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos.
The settlement, which was filed publicly Saturday, reveals the network will also pay $1 million in Trump’s attorneys’ fees and will issue an apology.
ABC News will issue the following statement as an editor’s note on the online article at the center of the suit: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”
“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” an ABC News spokesperson wrote in a statement.
Trump filed the lawsuit in Florida federal court earlier this year, arguing that Stephanopoulos and ABC News defamed him when the anchor said 10 times during a contentious on-air interview with South Carolina GOP Rep. Nancy Mace in March that a jury found Trump had “raped” E. Jean Carroll.
Carroll alleged that Trump raped her in a department store in the mid-1990s and that he defamed her when he denied her claim. Trump has denied all wrongdoing toward Carroll.
In 2023, a jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll, sufficient to hold him liable for battery, though it did not find that Carroll proved he raped her. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million for battery and defamation. In January, Carroll was awarded an additional $83.3 million in damages for defamatory statements made by Trump that disparaged her and denied her rape allegations.
A judge concluded in August 2023, when dismissing Trump’s countersuit against Carroll, that the claim Trump raped Carroll was “substantially true.” The judge wrote that Trump “raped” her in the broader sense of that word, as people generally understand it, though not as it is narrowly defined by New York state law.
In the lawsuit filed against ABC News in March, Trump claimed that Stephanopoulos’ statements were “false, intentional, malicious and designed to cause harm.”
A judge in July refused to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit against the network, writing that these definitions were different enough. He added that the case would turn on “whether it is substantially true to say a jury (or juries) found (Trump) liable for rape by a jury despite the jury’s verdict expressly finding he was not liable for rape.”
The settlement came a day after a federal judge ruled that Trump and Stephanopoulos must sit for a deposition sometime next week. The president-elect can now avoid testifying under oath, which could have come with potential legal risks as he prepares to return to the White House.
Trump has a history of filing lawsuits against the news media. In late October, he filed a lawsuit against CBS, demanding $10 billion in damages over the network’s “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. His legal counsel claimed the interview with Harris and the associated programming were “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of the presidential election in her 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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