ABC News Is Set To Pay Trump Library $15 Million In Defamation Settlement

ABC News has agreed to donate $15 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum, and pay an additional $1 million in legal fees, to settle a defamation case he brought against the network and its star anchor George Stephanopoulos earlier this year.

“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” ABC News spokesperson Jeannie Kedas said.

Trump alleged that the network and Stephanopoulos, the former White House communications director under Bill Clinton and the host of “This Week,” defamed him in March of this year.

The lawsuit stems from an interview Stephanopoulos conducted with Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, about another defamation case. He asked Mace, who has been vocal about being a victim of rape as a teenager, how she could endorse the president after he had “been found liable for rape by a jury.” The anchor was referring to the winding legal battle between Trump and writer E. Jean Carroll, who has held for years that Trump raped her in a New York City department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. A jury sided with Carroll and ordered the former president to pay her about $90 million.

The issue at hand, Trump alleged, was that in that case, he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll—but not for “rape.” That difference in language, as the judge in the case, Lewis Kaplan, attested to many times, has less to do with what transpired in that dressing room and more to do with New York’s legal limitations when it comes to sexual violence.

At the time of that trial, New York law said that someone could only be convicted of rape if there was vaginal penetration by a penis. During Carroll’s testimony and in her previous retelling of the event, she said that Trump used both his fingers and his penis to assault her.

“He had pulled down my tights, and his hand went—his fingers went into my vagina, which was extremely painful, extremely painful. It was a horrible feeling because he curved, he put his hand inside of me and curved his finger. As I’m sitting here today, I can still feel it,” Carroll testified, adding, “Then he inserted his penis.”

Trump has repeatedly denied that this happened, saying, “She said that I did something to her that never took place. There was no anything. I know nothing about this nut job” and that “she’s not my type.”

The jury concluded, according to Kaplan’s decision, that Trump had “deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long-lasting emotional and psychological harm” but did not rule affirmatively on if he had also used his penis. In short, because New York required penile penetration, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and not rape.

Yet, Kaplan said that just because the jury went forward with the sexual abuse charge “does not mean that [Carroll] failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

“Indeed,” Kaplan continued, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump, in fact, did exactly that.”

Shortly after Carroll was awarded $5 million in that trial, New York changed the law, broadening the state’s definition of rape and eliminating the penile penetration requirement. After Governor Kathy Hochul signed the bill “Rape Is Rape” into law, she thanked Carroll.

“I couldn’t help but notice a reoccurring theme in the headlines, influential men abusing their positions of power to inflict pain on women,” Hochul said, adding, “and though she couldn’t be here with us today, I want to take a moment to recognize E. Jean Carroll for her courageous efforts to make sure justice was done.”

Still, Stephanopoulos used the word “rape,” and Trump used the legal language discrepancy as grounds for his lawsuit.

In addition to the settlement, the network and Stephanopoulos also published a statement saying they “regret” the remarks made about Trump during the March interview. A similar note now appears at the bottom of an online ABC News article about Stephanopoulos’s interaction with Mace.

Stephanopoulos was asked about the case and how it feels to be sued by a former president during an appearance on “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in May. “Unfortunately,” he began, “it now comes with the territory.”

“But,” he continued, “I’m not going to be cowed out of doing my job because of the threat of Donald Trump.” The crowd applauds.

The ABC News settlement is a rare legal win for Trump in his fight against media organizations. As the New York Times reports, Trump “has frequently sued news organizations for defamation and frequently lost, including in litigation against CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.”

The Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum and Alan Feuer wrote following the news that, “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.”

In defamation suits of this kind, a plaintiff doesn’t just have to prove that a news outlet published false information, but that it did so with “actual malice”—knowing that the information was false—or with substantial doubts about its accuracy.

It’s unclear how this settlement could embolden the president-elect, who has repeatedly referred to the press as the “enemy of the people.”