‘Far from normal’: A former U.S. attorney slams Trump over ABC lawsuit

ABC News’ unprecedented $16 million settlement with Donald Trump marks a seismic shift in how media organizations might handle future coverage of the president-elect, legal experts warn.

The network agreed Saturday to pay $15 million toward Trump’s future presidential library and $1 million in legal fees to settle a defamation lawsuit over ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos’ March statements about the E. Jean Carroll case verdict.

“This is so far from normal that it is difficult to process,” former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance wrote in her newsletter, questioning why ABC would settle before even completing discovery or depositions. The lawsuit centered on Stephanopoulos’ assertion during a “This Week” interview with Rep. Nancy Mace that Trump had been “found liable for rape.” While a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, it did not find him liable for rape under New York’s narrow legal definition requiring penile penetration.

However, Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the Carroll case, wrote that the jury’s finding “implicitly determined that [Trump] forcibly penetrated [Carroll] digitally” and that Trump “in fact did ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York Penal Law.”

First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams called the settlement “disturbing,” noting it represents “a major victory” for Trump. “For a person, especially one now about to become our president, held by a jury to have committed an act of sexual abuse to receive an amount of this magnitude in settlement is disturbing,” Abrams told CNN. The timing raised particular concerns among legal experts. The settlement came just before scheduled depositions of both Trump and Stephanopoulos, and after ABC executives, including Debra OConnell, met with Trump’s transition team in Florida.

“That suggests something else is going on here, and it’s deeply concerning if that something is that ABC, a major news organization, has decided to curry favor with the incoming president instead of sticking to its guns,” Vance wrote. RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, sees the settlement as potentially signaling a broader shift. “What we might be seeing here is an attitudinal shift,” she said. “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.”

The unusual settlement may create a dangerous precedent for journalism, potentially chilling coverage of Trump and other notoriously litigious public figures under his MAGA umbrella. For ABC News journalists and any properties within Disney’s giant sphere, the agreement may complicate their ability to report thoroughly on any portion of Trump’s presidency, given their major network’s capitulation to his legal demands. Another view of this could also be Disney flexing its muscles, suggesting it will be willing to pay out as a price of doing business in toeing the line.

Legal experts note that to win at trial, Trump would have needed to prove not only that Stephanopoulos’ statements were false but also that they were made with “reckless disregard” for their truth or falsity—a historically high bar for public figures in defamation cases.

Human rights attorney Qasim Rashid called the settlement an act of cowardice, while Democratic attorney Marc E. Elias described it as moving to “Kiss the ring. Bend the knee. Obey in advance.” The implications of this settlement may reverberate through newsrooms across America as journalists and media executives weigh the costs – both financial and editorial—of aggressive coverage against the threat of litigation from an increasingly litigious incoming president.