ABC News is set to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump.

The agreement was a significant concession by a major news organisation 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 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 Trump during a televised interview in March.

ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, will pay Trump an additional $1 million for his legal fees.

The outcome is an unusual win for Trump, who has frequently sued news organisations 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 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 organisations 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 Trump declined to comment on the agreement.

Trump sued ABC and Stephanopoulos in March, after the anchor asked Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who has spoken publicly about being raped as a teenager, why she had continued to support Trump after he was found “liable for rape” in a 2023 civil case in Manhattan.

In that case, a federal jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, but it did not find him liable for rape. Still, the judge who oversaw the proceeding later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of rape, the jury’s verdict did not mean that Carroll had “failed to prove that Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’.”

In his lawsuit, Trump accused Stephanopoulos of harming his reputation by saying multiple times on-air that he had been found liable for raping Carroll. (Trump was ordered by a jury in the Carroll case to pay her damages of $83.3 million. He is appealing the verdict.)

The settlement agreement in the defamation case, filed in Federal District Court in Miami, was signed on Friday, the same day that a judge ordered Trump to sit for a deposition in the case next week in Florida. Stephanopoulos was also on the verge of being deposed.

Tensions ran high between ABC News and Trump’s camp throughout the 2024 campaign.

Trump denounced ABC as “terrible” for its handling of his sole debate against Vice-President Kamala Harris, faulting the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for fact-checking his answers and musing about stripping the network of its broadcasting license.

He also grumbled about the ties between Harris and Dana Walden, the senior Disney executive whose sprawling portfolio includes ABC News. Walden is a longtime friend of the Vice-President who held Harris fund-raisers at her home. ABC News said that Walden played no role in editorial decisions.

Debra OConnell, the Disney executive who directly oversees ABC News, dined with Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in Palm Beach last Monday, according to two people briefed on their interaction. The dinner was part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Trump’s transition team.

News networks typically arrange such meetings ahead of a new presidential administration to discuss subjects like booking and day-to-day coverage. Another person familiar with the meeting said its purpose was to discuss Trump’s White House transition, not the pending defamation case.

Under the settlement terms, ABC agreed to place an editor’s note at the bottom of an online article about the interview with Mace.

New York Times News Service