ABC agrees to donate $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, Maryland.

Stephanie Scarbrough/AP

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Stephanie Scarbrough/AP

NEW YORK (AP) — ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate claim on the show that the president-elect was civilly liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll was held liable.

According to settlement documents released Saturday, ABC will also post a note on its website expressing regret over the lawsuit in a segment on Stephanopoulos’ March 10 show. 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 under the terms of the court docket.”

Trump sued Stephanopoulos and ABC for defamation, days after the host claimed in an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., that Trump was “liable for rape,” misrepresenting the verdicts in Carroll’s two lawsuits against him .

Last year, Trump was found guilty of sexual assault and defamation against Carroll and ordered to pay $5 million. In January, he was found liable on additional defamation charges and ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million. Trump is appealing both rulings.

None of the verdicts established rape within the meaning of New York law.

The judge in both cases, Lewis Kaplan, said the jury concluded that Carroll had not proven that Trump raped her “in the narrow, technical sense of a specific section of New York penal law.”

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

The judge said the verdict did not mean that Carroll “could not prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her, since many people have a general understanding of the word ‘rape.'” In fact… the jury concluded that Mr. Trump did indeed did exactly that.”