During a March 10 interview with Representative Nancy Grace on George Stephanopoulos’ This Week program, Stephanopoulos claimed that The Fascist Guy had been “found liable for rape,” which misstated the verdicts in E. Jean Carroll’s two lawsuits against him. Shortly after Stephanopoulos’ statement, TFG sued him and ABC for defamation. Now, ABC has agreed to donate $15 million to TFG’s ‘presidential library’ and pay an additional $1 million in legal fees to his lawyer.
In a statement, ABC News said: "We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing."
Last year, a jury found TFG liable for sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll. They ordered him to pay her $5 million. TFG then doubled down and defamed Ms. Carroll again and was ordered to pay her $83.3 million. He has appealed both verdicts. However, neither verdict involved a finding of rape as defined under New York law.
The judge in both cases, Lewis Kaplan, has said that the jury’s conclusion was that Carroll had failed to prove that Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law.”
Kaplan noted that the definition of rape was “far narrower” than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes and elsewhere.
The judge said the verdict did not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed … the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
