ABC News agreed to contribute $15 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential foundation and museum to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump, according to documents filed Saturday in U.S. District Court.
Trump had accused ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos of acting out “with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth,” after Stephanopoulos said Trump had been “convicted of rape” in a March 10 interview with Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
Trump claimed in the filing that Stephanopoulos “knows that these statements are patently and demonstrably false.”
As part of the settlement, ABC News must also publish an “editor’s note” at the bottom of the March 10 online article that accompanied the interview that reads: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements about President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”
Trump’s presidential foundation and museum have yet to be established. As part of the settlement, ABC News will also pay Trump’s lawyers $1 million to cover legal fees.
The agreement, dated Friday, was signed by Trump and Stephanopoulos.
“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit under the terms of the court filing,” an ABC News spokesperson told CBS News in a statement.
Earlier Friday, before the two sides reached a settlement, Magistrate Judge Lisette Reid had ordered Trump to appear for an in-person deposition in the case in the Southern District of Florida, where his Mar-a- lake Reid said the questioning would have been limited to four hours.
He had also ordered Stephanopoulos to sit down for a deposition next week, either in person or remotely.
In May 2023, a federal jury in New York found Trump responsible for sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York City in the mid-1990s. Trump was also held liable for defaming Carroll for comments he made about her after her published a book in 2019 detailing the alleged encounter.
The jury ordered Carroll to pay $5 million in damages.
In January 2024, Trump he was again held responsible for defamation by a New York federal jury in a separate lawsuit filed by Carroll. That jury ordered him to pay another $83.3 million in damages.
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contributed to this report.