President-elect Donald Trump announcing his presidential bid at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla in 2022
ABC News agreed to a $15 million settlement with Donald Trump following an on-air accusation from anchor George Stephanopoulos that falsely labeled him “liable for rape.”
President-elect Donald Trump announcing his presidential bid at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla in 2022 (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
In one of the significant legal victories for former President Donald Trump, ABC News will pay him $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit after anchor George Stephanopoulos falsely claimed that Trump was “liable for rape” during an interview. The statement, repeated 10 times by Stephanopoulos, was controversial and sent the media into a frenzy.
The defamation case is over an interview on ABC’s This Week when Stephanopoulos asked Congresswoman Nancy Mace about her support for Trump, falsely stating that two separate juries had found Trump liable for rape. The problem? The civil case he was referencing found Trump liable for sexual abuse but not rape.
ABC News has now agreed to pay the $15 million, which will be used to finance Trump’s future presidential library and museum. This is unprecedented in the case, given that the settlement is less of a cash payout than funding a long-term project. Besides this, ABC News will also pay $1 million towards Trump’s legal fees, adding to the financial load the network will incur. The settlement agreement will require ABC to run an editor’s note acknowledging its mistake.
The note will be attached to its March 10, 2024, article and will read: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald. Trump made this statement during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC News Live This Week.” Trump’s victory today in the defamation lawsuit comes as he was last month found liable in a civil case for the sexual abuse of writer E Jean back in 1996.
The Trump legal team is already appealing the Carroll case, as are the $83.3 million in damages awarded to Carroll over defamatory comments from Trump in the past.
However, the reverberations from this case go way beyond Trump. It puts questions under the spotlight about ABC News’s media responsibility and what happens when public figures, particularly political ones, are faced with falsehoods. Trump, who has been a party to several high defamation cases, has sued outlets such as CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post over the same issues.
