ABC News to apologize and pay $16 Million in defamation suit settlement with Donald Trump

Donald Trump has often complained about fake news from the mainstream media, and now ABC will apologize and pay him a whopping $15 million settlement in a defamation suit brought by Trump last March.

As a face-saving gesture they are being allowed to pay it to his presidential library as opposed to Donald Trump himself. The network must also fork over $1 million to lalejandro Brito’s law firm which represents Trump.

George Stephanopoulos (Official White House Photo by Carlos Fyfe)

ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos reached the settlement in the case concerning remarks the longtime “Good Morning America” anchor made in a March 10 segment on his “This Week” program. ABC News posted on its website expressing regret over Stephanopoulos’ statements.

Stephanopoulos on air wrongly claimed numerous times on his program that Trump had been “found liable for rape” and “defaming the victim of that rape.” The former Clinton White House spokesman turned news anchor was referring to E. Jean Carroll, a former advice columnist who claimed in a 2019 memoir that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s at a Manhattan department store across the street from Trump Tower after they randomly crossed paths at an entrance.

Trump denied her claim, saying he didn’t know Carroll and never ran into her at the store.

He responded to the 30-year-old claim, calling her a “nut job” who invented “a fraudulent and false story” to sell her memoir. She immediately sued him for damages and sought a retraction of what she said were Trump’s defamatory comments.

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While the Manhattan jury found Trump liable in a controversial and politically-charged civil trial for sexual abuse and defamation, Trump has appealed the verdict with some experts say he has a strong chance of it being overturned. The verdict came while Trump was running for president for the second time.

Trump has also taken CBS News to court and is requesting $10 billion in damages after the network engaged in “deceptive conduct” to interfere in the presidential election during an October interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

–Lee Hartman | Metro Voice                             

Photo: Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia 2.0