Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
A top corporate media player is paying a hefty price for its Trump Derangement Syndrome and for the claims of its Democrat Party hack.
ABC will fork $15 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential library fund to bail out big-mouth anchor George Stephanopoulos for his false assertions that Trump had been found liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll, according to the terms of the settlement.
The agreement, signed Friday and made public Saturday, characterizes the payment as a “charitable contribution.”
ABC News weasels simply added an editor’s note at the bottom of a March 10, 2024 story headlined, “Nancy Mace defends her support for Trump after he was found liable for sexual assault.” They had no choice. The settlement demanded it.
“Editor’s Note: 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,” the suspect apology states.
The story and Stephanopoulos badgered the South Carolina Republican congresswoman for her support of Trump, who in a May 2023 civil case was found liable for sexually abusing Carroll decades ago.
The jury in a trial that reeked of politics in another New York kangaroo court rejected Carroll’s claim that she was raped in a posh Manhattan department store. Stephanopoulos repeatedly and falsely said Trump had been “found liable for rape” during a March interview with Mace on ABC’s “This Week.”
Trump, who was at the time the leading candidate for the GOP’s presidential nomination and hounded by political prosecutions aimed at knocking the Democrats’ top political enemy out of the race, quickly filed a defamation lawsuit accusing the ABC News anchor and former Clinton crony with “actual malice or with a reckless disregard for the truth.”
Trump has denied Carroll’s allegations. Carroll apparently couldn’t remember precisely when the alleged sexual abuse took place, but she’s confident it occurred nearly 30 years ago.
Interestingly, as my Federalist colleague Tristan Justice wrote earlier this year, former Clinton White House Communications Director Stephanopoulos served as President Bill Clinton’s “point man orchestrating smear campaigns against Clinton’s accusers of sexual misconduct throughout the ’90s.”
“During his tenure, Stephanopoulos led Clinton’s operation to discredit allegations of sexual harassment from Paula Jones, a former employee of Clinton’s from his time as governor who sued the president in 1994,” Justice noted.
In January, a jury in a defamation case ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83 million. The president-elect has appealed the civil judgments against him.
According to the ABC defamation lawsuit settlement, the network must transfer the $15 million to an escrow account overseen by Alejandro Brito, Trump’s attorney. ABC also must pay Brito’s law firm $1 million. The money must arrive within 10 days, right before Christmas, according to the agreement.
“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” ABC News spokeswoman Jeannie Kedas said in a statement to multiple news outlets.
A Trump spokesman did not immediately return The Federalist’s request for comment.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.