AP (“ABC agrees to give $15 million to Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle defamation lawsuit“):
ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million toward Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
As part of the settlement made public Saturday, ABC News posted an editor’s note to its website expressing regret over Stephanopoulos’ statements during a March 10 segment on his “This Week” program. The network will also pay $1 million in legal fees to the law firm of Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito.
The settlement agreement describes ABC’s presidential library payment as a “charitable contribution,” with the money earmarked for a non-profit organization that is being established in connection with the yet-to-be built library.
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The settlement agreement was signed Friday, the same day a Florida federal judge ordered Trump and Stephanopoulos to sit for separate depositions in the case next week. The settlement means that sworn testimony is no longer required.
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Trump sued ABC and Stephanopoulos in federal court in Miami days after the network aired the segment, in which the longtime “Good Morning America” anchor and “This Week” host repeatedly misstated the verdicts in Carroll’s two civil lawsuits against Trump.
During a live “This Week” interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., Stephanopoulos wrongly claimed that Trump had been “found liable for rape” and “defaming the victim of that rape.”
Neither verdict involved a finding of rape as defined under New York law.
In the first of the lawsuits to go to trial, Trump was found liable last year of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll. A jury ordered him to pay her $5 million.
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Testifying in April 2023, Carroll told jurors: “I’m here because Donald Trump raped me, and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and shattered my reputation, and I’m here to try and get my life back.”
After she’d agreed to help Trump shop for a gift for a woman, Carroll testified that he pushed her against a dressing room wall, stamped his mouth onto hers, yanked down her tights and shoved his hand and then his penis inside her while she struggled against him.
She said she finally kneed him off her and fled.
In upholding the $5 million judgment in the first trial, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that the unanimous verdict was almost entirely in favor of Carroll, except that the jury concluded she had failed to prove that Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law.”
Kaplan, who presided over both of Carroll’s lawsuits against Trump, said the definition of rape in the state code was “far narrower” than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes and elsewhere.
Under New York law, a rape finding requires vaginal penetration by a penis. Forcible penetration without consent of the vagina or other bodily orifices by fingers or anything else is labeled “sexual abuse.”
The judge said the verdict did not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed … the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
So . . . Carroll testified that Trump raped her. The jury found that he merely sexually assaulted her because his conduct did not meet New York’s statutory definition of “rape.” But the judge said the findings amounted to rape as commonly understood. And Trump was found civilly liable for that and ordered to pay damages.
NYT (“ABC to Pay $15 Million to Settle a Defamation Suit Brought by Trump“) adds:
The agreement was a significant concession by a major news organization and a rare victory for a media-bashing politician whose previous litigation efforts against news outlets have often ended in defeat.
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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.”
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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.
The possible explanations for the settlement that occur to me, which aren’t mutually exclusive, are:
The $15 million settlement is a small price to make a nuisance go away. Parent company Disney brought in $22.6 billion the last quarter. ABC is increasingly a money loser overall, and the news division has always been a drain on profits. Journalism is not a huge priority for Disney leadership, so concern for setting a bad precedent is probably rather low.
It’s also possible that Walden’s relationship with Harris will look like a significant conflict of interest to the general public. Paying a small fee to keep the dirty laundry hidden may well be worth it.
Finally, given the degree to which Trump has promised to make his second term a revenge tour against those who he perceives to have wronged him, it’s quite possible that Disney leadership wants to be further down the list. Kissing the ring may well achieve that goal.
