ABC agrees to give $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle lawsuit: NPR

President-elect Donald Trump, left, and Vice President-elect JD Vance attend Saturday’s NCAA college football game between Army and Navy at Northwest Stadium in Landover, Md.

Stephanie Scarbrough/AP

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Stephanie Scarbrough/AP

NEW YORK – ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’s inaccurate on-air claim that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping author E. Jean Carroll.

According to settlement documents released Saturday, ABC will also post a note on its website expressing regret over the claim in a March 10 segment on Stephanopoulos’ This week program and pay $1 million in legal fees to Trump’s lawyer.

In a statement, ABC News said, “We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms of the trial.”

Trump sued Stephanopoulos and ABC for defamation days after the anchor, during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, RS.C., argued that Trump had been “found guilty of rape,” falsifying the verdicts in Carroll’s two trials against him.

Last year, Trump was found liable for sexual assault and defamation of Carroll and was ordered to pay her $5 million. In January, he was found liable on additional defamation claims and ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million. Trump is appealing both sentences.

None of the convictions involved a finding of rape as defined under New York law.

The judge in both cases, Lewis Kaplan, has said that the jury’s conclusion was that Carroll had not proven that Trump raped her “within the narrow technical meaning of a certain part of New York’s criminal code.”

Kaplan noted that the definition of rape was “far narrower” than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes, and elsewhere.

The judge said the verdict did not mean Carroll “couldn’t prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her, as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.'” In fact … the jury found that Mr. Trump actually did exactly that. “