ABC pays sex assaulter $15 million for saying jury found he had raped woman, as opposed to sexually assaulting her
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That’s slicing the libel bologna extraordinarily thin, but on the other hand if you think of it as protection money it all makes sense. Except it won’t actually buy much if any protection. Just like in the other made for TV rackets.
ABC News will pay $15 million to a “presidential foundation and museum” in a settlement reached with President-elect Donald Trump in his defamation suit against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos.
The settlement, which was filed publicly Saturday, reveals the network will also pay $1 million in Trump’s attorneys’ fees and will issue an apology.
ABC News will issue the following statement as an editor’s note on the online article at the center of the suit: “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.”
“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” an ABC News spokesperson wrote in a statement.
Trump filed the lawsuit in Florida federal court earlier this year, arguing that Stephanopoulos and ABC News defamed him when the anchor said 10 times during a contentious on-air interview with South Carolina GOP Rep. Nancy Mace in March that a jury found Trump had “raped” E. Jean Carroll.
Carroll alleged that Trump raped her in a department store in the mid-1990s and that he defamed her when he denied her claim. Trump has denied all wrongdoing toward Carroll.
In 2023, a jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll, sufficient to hold him liable for battery, though it did not find that Carroll proved he raped her. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million for battery and defamation. In January, Carroll was awarded an additional $83.3 million in damages for defamatory statements made by Trump that disparaged her and denied her rape allegations.
A judge concluded in August 2023, when dismissing Trump’s countersuit against Carroll, that the claim Trump raped Carroll was “substantially true.” The judge wrote that Trump “raped” her in the broader sense of that word, as people generally understand it, though not as it is narrowly defined by New York state law.
I assume the Trump Foundation is pretty much like the Human Fund.
What a country.