By Michael M. Grynbaum and Alan Feuer
ABC News is set to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald Trump.
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.
Under the terms of a settlement revealed Saturday, ABC News will donate the $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum. The network and its star anchor, George Stephanopoulos, also published a statement saying they “regret” remarks made about Trump during a televised interview in March.
ABC News, which is owned by The Walt Disney Co., will pay Trump an additional $1 million for his legal fees.
The outcome is an unusual win for Trump, who has frequently sued news organizations for defamation and frequently lost, including in litigation against CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Several experts in media law said they believed ABC News could have continued to fight, given the high threshold required by the courts for a public figure like 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.”
ABC News did not elaborate Saturday about its precise reasons for settling. “We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” a network spokesperson said. A lawyer for Trump declined to comment on the agreement.
Trump sued ABC and Stephanopoulos in March, after the anchor asked Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who has spoken publicly about being raped as a teenager, why she had continued to support Trump after he was found “liable for rape” in a 2023 civil case in New York City.
In that case, a federal jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, but it did not find him liable for rape. Still, the judge who oversaw the proceeding later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of rape, the jury’s verdict did not mean that Carroll had “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
In his lawsuit, Trump accused Stephanopoulos of harming his reputation by saying multiple times on-air that he had been found liable for raping Carroll. (Trump was ordered by a jury in the Carroll case to pay her damages of $83.3 million. He is appealing the verdict.)
The settlement agreement in the defamation case, filed in U.S. District Court in Miami, was signed Friday, the same day that a judge ordered Trump to sit for a deposition in the case next week in Florida. Stephanopoulos was also on the verge of being deposed.
Under the settlement terms, ABC agreed to place an editor’s note at the bottom of an online article about the interview with Mace. The note reads: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”
In May, Stephanopoulos was asked about Trump’s pending lawsuit during an appearance on “Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
“How does it feel to be sued by a former president for defamation for just doing your job?” Colbert asked.
“Unfortunately, it now comes with the territory,” Stephanopoulos replied. “But I’m not going to be cowed out of doing my job because of the threat of Donald Trump.”
The audience cheered.
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