George Stephanopoulos issues statement to President Trump amid $15million settlement

ABC News and George Stephanopoulos have issued a public apology and will pay $15 million towards a “presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for” President Donald Trump after reaching a settlement in a defamation suit.

The settlement was filed on Saturday December 14, and reveals the network will also pay $1million in Trump’s attorneys’ fees.

“ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024,” it read.

“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” an ABC News spokesperson wrote in a statement.

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Trump, who won the 2024 presidency and will return to the White House in January 2025, filed the lawsuit alleging that George and ABC News had defamed him during an interview with South Carolina GOP representative Nancy Mace.

Trump had argued that long time news anchor George and ABC News made statements that were “false, intentional, malicious and designed to cause harm” when they said, on air and at 10 different times, that Trump had “raped” E. Jean Caroll.

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Caroll had previously alleged that Trump raped her in a department store in the mid-1990, and in 2023 a jury found that the New York businessman had sexually abused her, with the jury acknowledging it was sufficient to hold him liable for battery.

Trump was forced to pay Carroll $5 million for battery and defamation, and an additional $83.3 million in damages for his defamatory statements disparaging her and denying her allegations.

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The jury, however, did not find that Caroll had been able to prove rape under New York law but a judge later concluded that Trump had “raped” her in the broader sense of that word, as people generally understand it.

“Indeed, the jury’s verdict in Carroll II establishes, as against Mr Trump, the fact that Mr Trump ‘raped her’, albeit digitally rather than with his penis. Thus, it establishes against him the substantial truth of Ms Carroll’s ‘rape’ accusations,” Judge Lewis Caplan had written.

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Trump’s win in the 2024 election was announced in the early hours of November 6, 2024 after he scooped 277 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’ 219.At 78, he is the oldest person ever elected to the office. 

The state of Wisconsin carried the former president over the finish line to 270 Electoral College votes. He also won six other swing states including Pennsylvania and Georgia.

He said he had won a “magnificent victory for the American people,” adding: “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.””This was the greatest political movement of all time,” he told crowds in Florida. “Now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal.”