ABC News is set to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump.
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
BACKSTORY
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.
The outcome is an unusual win for Mr. Trump, who has frequently sued news organizations for defamation and frequently lost, including in litigation against CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post 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.
Under the terms of a settlement revealed on Saturday, ABC News will donate the $15 million to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum. The network and its star anchor, George Stephanopoulos, also published a statement saying they “regret” remarks made about Mr. Trump during a televised interview in March.
ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, will pay Mr. Trump an additional $1 million for his legal fees.
Several experts in media law said they believed that ABC News could have continued to fight, given the high threshold required by the courts for a public figure like Mr. Trump to prove defamation. A plaintiff must not only show that a news outlet published false information, but that it did so knowing that the information was false or with substantial doubts about its accuracy.
“Major news organizations have often been very leery of settlements in defamation suits brought by public officials and public figures, both because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah.
“What we might be seeing here is an attitudinal shift,” she added. “Compared to the mainstream American press of a decade ago, today’s press is far less financially robust, far more politically threatened, and exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom, rather than embrace a vilification of it.”
ABC News did not elaborate on Saturday about its precise reasons for settling. “We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” a network spokeswoman said. A lawyer for Mr. Trump declined to comment on the agreement.
Mr. Trump sued ABC and Mr. Stephanopoulos in March, after the anchor asked Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who has spoken publicly about being raped as a teenager, why she had continued to support Mr. Trump after he was found “liable for rape” in a 2023 civil case in Manhattan.
In that case, a federal jury found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, but it did not find him liable for rape. Still, the judge who oversaw the proceeding later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of rape, the jury’s verdict did not mean that Ms. Carroll had “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
In his lawsuit, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Stephanopoulos of harming his reputation by saying multiple times on-air that he had been found liable for raping Ms. Carroll. (Mr. Trump was ordered by a jury in the Carroll case to pay her damages of $83.3 million. He is appealing the verdict.)
The settlement agreement in the defamation case, filed in Federal District Court in Miami, was signed on Friday, the same day that a judge ordered Mr. Trump to sit for a deposition in the case next week in Florida. Mr. Stephanopoulos was also on the verge of being deposed.
Tensions ran high between ABC News and Mr. Trump’s camp throughout the 2024 campaign.
Mr. Trump denounced ABC as “terrible” for its handling of his sole debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, faulting the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for fact-checking his answers and musing about stripping the network of its broadcasting license.
He also grumbled about the ties between Ms. Harris and Dana Walden, the senior Disney executive whose sprawling portfolio includes ABC News. Ms. Walden is a longtime friend of the vice president who held Harris fund-raisers at her home. ABC News said that Ms. Walden played no role in editorial decisions.
Debra OConnell, the Disney executive who directly oversees ABC News, dined with Mr. Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in Palm Beach last Monday, according to two people briefed on their interaction. The dinner was part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.
News networks typically arrange such meetings ahead of a new presidential administration to discuss subjects like booking and day-to-day coverage. Another person familiar with the meeting said its purpose was to discuss Mr. Trump’s White House transition, not the pending defamation case.
Under the settlement terms, ABC agreed to place an editor’s note at the bottom of an online article about the interview with Ms. Mace. The note reads: “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.”
In May, Mr. Stephanopoulos was asked about Mr. Trump’s pending lawsuit during an appearance on “Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
“How does it feel to be sued by a former president for defamation for just doing your job?” Mr. Colbert asked.
“Unfortunately, it now comes with the territory,” Mr. Stephanopoulos replied. “But I’m not going to be cowed out of doing my job because of the threat of Donald Trump.”
The audience cheered.
