legrandangle-lgm

NEW YORK (AP) — ABC News has agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’s inaccurate claim that the president-elect was found civilly liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll.

According to settlement documents made public Saturday, ABC will also post a note on its website expressing regret over the claim in a March 10 segment on Stephanopoulos’s “This Week” program and pay $1 million in legal fees to Trump’s lawyer.

In a statement, ABC News said: “We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit based on the terms of the lawsuit.”

Trump sued Stephanopoulos and ABC for defamation days after the host claimed during an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., that Trump had been “found responsible for rape,” misrepresenting statements in Carroll’s two lawsuits against him.

Last year, Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll and ordered to pay her $5 million. In January, he was found liable for additional defamation claims and ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million. Trump will appeal both rulings.

Neither ruling was a finding of rape as defined under New York law.

The judge in both cases, Lewis Kaplan, has said the jury concluded that Carroll had failed to prove that Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of New York criminal law. ”

Kaplan noted that the definition of rape was “much narrower” than how rape is defined in modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal laws, 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.’ In fact… the jury found that Mr. Trump did just that.”