ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million towards Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos's inaccurate on-air assertion that the US president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E Jean Carroll.
As part of the settlement, signed on Friday and made public on Saturday, ABC posted an editor's note to its website expressing “regret” over Stephanopoulos's statements during a March 10 segment on his This Week programme. The network will also pay $1 million in legal fees to the law firm of Mr Trump’s lawyer.
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 representative Jeannie Kedas said.
A Florida federal judge had ordered Mr Trump and Stephanopoulos to sit for separate depositions in the case next week but the settlement means that sworn testimony is no longer required.
Mr Trump sued ABC and Stephanopoulos in federal court in Miami days after the network aired the segment, in which the long-time Good Morning America anchor and This Week host repeatedly misstated the verdicts in Ms Carroll’s two civil lawsuits against Mr Trump.
During a live interview, Stephanopoulos wrongly claimed that Mr Trump had been “found liable for rape” and “defaming the victim of that rape”. Mr Trump had actually been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
Ms Carroll, a former advice columnist, went public in a 2019 memoir with her allegation that Mr Trump raped her in the mid-1990s at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury Manhattan department store across the street from Trump Tower, after they crossed paths at an entrance.
Mr Trump denied her claim, calling Ms Carroll a “nut job” who invented “a fraudulent and false story” to sell her memoir.
After being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, Mr Trump was ordered to pay Ms Carroll about $91 million. He has since appealed the decision.
In a later ruling, Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the case wrote that just because Ms Carroll had failed to prove rape “within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape'", adding that the state's definition of the crime is “far narrower” than how it is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere.
The ABC suit is one of a small but notable group of civil cases involving Mr Trump that are pending as he prepares to re-enter the White House. He has active cases against CBS and journalist Bob Woodward and publisher Simon & Schuster, and is appealing the dismissal of a suit against CNN.
As a defendant, Mr Trump is facing several lawsuits seeking to hold him responsible for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and a defamation case filed by the “Central Park Five” over his comments at a presidential debate this year.