(CNN) – ABC News and George Stephanopoulos have reached a settlement with Donald Trump in their defamation lawsuit. The network plans to pay $15 million to the charity and apologize.
The proposed settlement was publicly filed on Saturday and reveals that ABC will pay $15 million in charitable contributions to “the Presidential Foundation and Museum established by or for plaintiffs.”
The network will also pay Trump’s legal fees of $1 million.
Trump filed a lawsuit in Florida federal court earlier this year, claiming that during a controversial on-air interview with South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace in March, an anchor accused a jury of Trump’s remark “I was raped.” ” E. Gene Carroll.
Carroll claimed that Trump raped her in a department store in the mid-1990s and that Trump defamed her by denying her allegations. President Trump has denied all wrongdoing against Carroll.
In 2023, a jury found that Mr. Trump sexually abused her, and although they could not prove that Mr. Carroll raped her, it was enough to hold Mr. Trump liable for the assault. A jury awarded Carroll $5 million for assault and defamation. In January, Carroll was ordered to pay an additional $83.3 million in damages for defamatory statements he made that belittled her and denied the rape allegation.
The jury did not find that Carroll proved rape by Trump. Instead, a judge dismissed Mr. Trump’s counterclaim against Ms. Carroll several months later, concluding that the allegation that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll was “substantially true.” A judge wrote in August 2023 that Trump had “raped” her in the broader sense commonly understood, not as New York law defines it narrowly.
In a lawsuit filed against ABC News in March, President Trump claimed Stephanopoulos’ comments were “false, intentional, malicious, and intended to cause harm.”
The judge refused to dismiss the case, saying the definitions were sufficiently different, and the case was allowed to proceed in July. He added that the lawsuit “alleges that the jury found[Trump]responsible for the rape, even though the jury verdict clearly found that Trump was not responsible for the rape.” The question will be whether it is substantively true, he added.
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