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

If part of the settlement made public on Saturday, ABC News posted a editor’s note on its website expressing regret over Stephanopoulos’ statements during a March 10 segment on his “This Week” program. The network will also pay $1 million in legal fees to the law firm of Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito.

The settlement agreement describes the ABC Presidential Library payment as a “charitable contribution,” with the money earmarked for a nonprofit organization to be established in connection with the yet-to-be-constructed library.

“We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms of the lawsuit,” ABC News spokesperson Jeannie Kedas said.

A Trump spokesman declined comment.

Trump, Stephanopoulos and ABC executives signed the settlement agreement on Friday.

The document bore Trump’s bold, clear 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 signed the agreement electronically.

Under the agreement, ABC News must transfer the $15 million for Trump’s library within 10 days to an escrow account managed by Brito’s law firm. The network must also pay Brito’s legal fees within 10 days.

While significant, ABC’s contribution to Trump’s presidential library will likely cover only a fraction of the cost. For example, former President Barack Obama’s library in Chicago would cost an estimated $830 million in 2021.

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 the “This Week” host repeatedly misstated statements in Carroll’s two civil lawsuits against Trump.

During a live “This Week” interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., Stephanopoulos falsely claimed that Trump had been “found responsible for rape” and “defamed the victim of that rape.”

Neither ruling was 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 sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll. A jury ordered him to pay her $5 million.

In January, Trump was found liable on additional defamation claims during a second trial in federal court in Manhattan and ordered to pay Carroll $83.3 million.

Trump will appeal both rulings.

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 near an entrance.

Trump denied her claimsaying he did not know Carroll and never encountered her in the store.

After Trump lashed out, calling Carroll a “madman” who concocted “a fraudulent and false story” to sell her memoir, she sued him for unspecified monetary damages and requested a retraction of what she said were defamatory denials of were Trump.

Carroll testified to jurors in April 2023: “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 buy a gift for a woman, Carroll testified that he pushed her against a dressing room wall, mashed his mouth on hers, pulled down her pantyhose and threw his hand and then his penis pushed into her as she struggled against him.

She said she eventually pushed him away and fled.

In 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 that she had failed to prove that Trump had raped ‘within the narrow, technical meaning’ of a certain section of New York criminal law.”

Kaplan, who presided over both of Carroll’s lawsuits against Trump, said the definition of rape in state law was “much narrower” than how rape is defined in modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes and elsewhere.

Under New York law, a finding of rape requires vaginal penetration by a penis. Forced penetration without consent of the vagina or other body openings with fingers or anything else is labeled as ‘sexual abuse’.

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 indeed do just that.”

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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.