An MSNBC host said comments by ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos that prompted President-elect Donald Trump to file a defamation lawsuit against the Disney-owned network “appear to hold up” — despite the fact that the company went under agreed to pay $15 million to fix the problem. claim.
Symone Sanders-Townsend, host of Sunday’s “The Weekend” on the left-leaning Comcast cable channel, said ABC News paying “feels like it has a real chilling effect.”
Sanders-Townsend, a former White House spokesman for Biden, said during the broadcast that “what Stephanopoulos said” about Trump’s responsibility for rape “doesn’t seem to hold up.” [with] what the judge said after the fact…” Her comments were reported by Mediaite.
She noted that Stephanopoulos is paying $1 million of his own money to Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, while ABC News is paying $15 million.
“It’s crazy,” she said.
The Post has sought comment from ABC News, MSNBC and the Trump transition.
ABC News agreed Saturday to pay $15 million to the Trump presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor Stephanopoulos’s inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for the rape of writer E. Jean. Carroll.
As part of the settlement made public Saturday, ABC News posted an editor’s note on its website expressing regret for Stephanopoulos’ statements during a March 10 segment on his “This Week” program.
“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit under the terms in the court filing,” ABC News spokeswoman Jeannie Kedas said.
The settlement agreement was signed on Friday, the same day a Florida federal judge ordered Trump and Stephanopoulos to sit for separate depositions in the case next week. The settlement means that the affidavit is no longer required.
The agreement had Trump’s bold, distinctive signature and an electronic signature with the initials GRS in a space for Stephanopoulos’ name.
Debra O’Connell, president of ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks, also electronically signed the agreement.
ABC News must transfer the $15 million for the Trump library to an escrow account managed by Brito’s law firm within 10 days, according to the agreement.
The network must also pay Brito’s legal fees within 10 days.
Trump sued ABC and Stephanopoulos in federal court in Miami days after the network aired the segment, in which the longtime “Good Morning America” host and “This Week” anchor repeatedly falsely stated the verdicts in the two lawsuits. Carroll’s civil suit against Trump.
During a live interview “This Week” with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), Stephanopoulos falsely claimed that Trump had been “found guilty of rape” and “defamation of the victim of that rape.”
Neither judgment involved a finding of rape as defined under New York law.
In the first of the lawsuits to go to trial, Trump was found liable last year for sexual abuse and defamation of Carroll. A jury ordered him to pay her $5 million.
In January, in a second trial in federal court in Manhattan, Trump was found liable on additional defamation claims and ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million.
Trump is appealing both decisions.
Carroll, a former advice columnist, went public in a 2019 memoir with her claim that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury department store in Manhattan across from Trump Tower, after they crossed paths at an entrance. .
Trump denied her claim, saying he didn’t know Carroll and never bumped into her at the store.
After Trump lashed out, calling Carroll a “freak job” who made up “a deceptive and false story” to sell her memoir, she sued him for unspecified monetary damages and demanded a retraction of those which she said were Trump’s defamatory denials.
Testifying in April 2023, Carroll told jurors: “I’m here because Donald Trump raped me and when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and ruined my reputation, and I’m here to try to get my life back.”
After she agreed to help Trump make a gift for a woman, Carroll testified, he pushed her against a locker room wall, planted his mouth on hers, removed her panties and inserted his hand and then his penis inside her while she. fought against him.
She said she finally knelt down and ran away.
Upholding the $5 million verdict in the first trial, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that the unanimous verdict was almost entirely in Carroll’s favor, except that the jury concluded she had failed to prove Trump raped her. that “within the narrow technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law.”
By postal wire
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