An MSNBC host said ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos’ comments that led President-elect Donald Trump to file a defamation lawsuit against the Disney-owned network “seems to hold up” — despite the fact that the company agreed to pay $15 million to settle the claim.
Symone Sanders-Townsend, host of Sunday’s “The Weekend” talk show on Comcast’s left-leaning cable channel, said ABC News paying the settlement “feels like it has a real chilling effect.”
Sanders-Townsend, a former spokesperson for the Biden White House, said during the broadcast that “what Stephanopoulos said” about Trump being liable for rape “seems 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 attorney Alejandro Brito while ABC News is paying $15 million.
“It’s insane,” she said.
The Post has sought comment from ABC News, MSNBC and the Trump transition.
ABC News on Saturday agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.
As part of the settlement made public Saturday, ABC News posted an editor’s note to its website expressing regret over 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 on the terms in the court filing,” ABC News spokesperson Jeannie Kedas said.
The settlement agreement was signed 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 sworn testimony is no longer required.
The agreement bore Trump’s bold, distinctive signature and an electronic signature with the initials GRS in a space for Stephanopoulos’ name.
Debra OConnell, president of ABC News Group and Disney Entertainment Networks, also e-signed the agreement.
ABC News must transfer the $15 million for Trump’s library to an escrow account that’s being 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” anchor and “This Week” host repeatedly misstated the verdicts in Carroll’s two civil lawsuits against Trump.
During a live “This Week” interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), Stephanopoulos wrongly claimed that Trump had been “found liable for rape” and “defaming the victim of that rape.”
Neither verdict 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 of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll. A jury ordered him to pay her $5 million.
In January, at 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 verdicts.
Carroll, a former advice columnist, went public in a 2019 memoir with her allegation that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury Manhattan department store across the street from Trump Tower, after they crossed paths at an entrance.
Trump denied her claim, saying he didn’t know Carroll and never ran into her at the store.
After Trump lashed out, calling Carroll a “nut job” who invented “a fraudulent and false story” to sell her memoir, she sued him for unspecified monetary damages and sought a retraction of what 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 shattered my reputation, and I’m here to try and get my life back.”
After she’d agreed to help Trump shop for a gift for a woman, Carroll testified, he pushed her against a dressing room wall, stamped his mouth onto hers, yanked down her tights and shoved his hand and then his penis inside her while she struggled against him.
She said she finally kneed him off her and fled.
In upholding the $5 million judgment in the first trial, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote that the unanimous verdict was almost entirely in favor of Carroll, except that the jury concluded she had failed to prove that Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law.”
With Post wires
