ABC News is set to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump, reported The New York Times.
The agreement was a significant concession by a major news
organization and a rare victory for a media-bashing politician whose previous
litigation efforts against news outlets have often ended in defeat.
Under the terms of a settlement revealed on Saturday, ABC
News will donate the $15 million to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation
and museum. The network and its star anchor, George Stephanopoulos, also
published a statement saying they “regret” remarks made about Mr. Trump during
a televised interview in March.
ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, will
pay Mr. Trump an additional $1 million for his legal fees.
The outcome is an unusual win for Mr. Trump, who has
frequently sued news organizations for defamation and frequently lost,
including in litigation against CNN, The New York Times and The Washington
Post.
Several experts in media law said they believed that ABC
News could have continued to fight, given the high threshold required by the
courts for a public figure like Mr. Trump to prove defamation. A plaintiff must
not only show that a news outlet published false information, but that it did
so knowing that the information was false or with substantial doubts about its
accuracy.
“Major news organizations have often been very leery of
settlements in defamation suits brought by public officials and public figures,
both because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have
the full weight of the First Amendment on their side,” said RonNell Andersen
Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah.
“What we might be seeing here is an attitudinal shift,” she
added. “Compared to the mainstream American press of a decade ago, today’s
press is far less financially robust, far more politically threatened, and
exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom, rather
than embrace a vilification of it.”
ABC News did not elaborate on Saturday about its precise
reasons for settling. “We are pleased that the parties have reached an
agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” a network
spokeswoman said. A lawyer for Mr. Trump declined to comment on the agreement.
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