President-elect Donald Trump and his legal team have agreed to a settlement in his defamation lawsuit against ABC News and television anchor George Stephanopoulos.
Trump filed the lawsuit after Stephanopoulos made an inaccurate assertion on a This Week segment that aired on March 10, 2024. During an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), Stephanopoulos said that Trump had been found civilly liable in 2023 for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
Carroll alleged in a long-running lawsuit that Trump had raped her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s, where he “forcibly penetrated her vagina with his fingers,” according to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw the case in New York. However, the state’s law narrowly defines rape as “vaginal penetration by a penis,” The Independent reported.
Trump was not found liable for rape in that case under the state’s definition of the offense, but he was found guilty of sexual assault and was found guilty of defaming the plaintiff in a separate lawsuit filed by Carroll.
Judge Kaplan wrote that the jury’s verdict in the rape case was “almost entirely” in her favor, but “the only point on which Ms. Carroll did not prevail was whether she had proved that Mr. Trump had ‘raped’ her within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law.”
However, the judge went on to state, per The Independent, “The finding that Ms.Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ 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.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial … makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump, in fact, did exactly that.”
However, a Florida judge overseeing the defamation case rejected the network’s claim that Stephanopoulos’ statements were “substantially true” and thus protected under Florida law.
The litigants in the lawsuit agreed to settle the case, with ABC paying $15 million as a “charitable contribution” to a nonprofit organization for the future construction of the Donald Trump presidential library. In addition, ABC will post a statement on its website expressing regret over Stephanopoulos’ claim and will pay $1 million in legal fees to Trump’s lawyer.