In what can be termed a big victory for US President-elect Donald Trump, ABC News has agreed to pay USD 15 million towards Trump's presidential library. This amount will go towards settling a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos' 'inaccurate' assertion on-air that Trump was found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
The settlement documents, which were made public on Saturday, indicate that ABC News will also post a note expressing regret over the claim made in the March 10 segment of Stephanopoulos' “This Week" programme. It will also pay USD 1 million in legal fees to the President-elect's lawyer.
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"We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing", ABC News said in a statement.
Earlier, Trump had sued Stephanopoulos and ABC for defamation after the claim was made during an interview with Nancy Mace.
However, in 2023, Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll and was ordered to pay her USD 5 million, while in January, he was found liable on additional defamation claims and ordered to pay Carroll USD 83.3 million. Notably, none of the verdicts involved the finding of rape as defined under New York law.
Lewis Kaplan, who was the judge in both cases, said that the jury concluded that Carroll could not prove that Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law."
Kaplan also emphasised that the definition of rape was “far narrower” than how rape gets defined in common modern parlance.
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Moreover, Trump is slated to become the 47th President of the United States as he takes the Oval Office in January. He has also been named Time magazine's Person of the Year, the magazine said in an announcement on Thursday. It is to be noted that Trump became only the second president in the history of the United States to lose reelection and then reclaim the White House in the subsequent election.
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(With inputs from agencies)
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