The historic defamation settlement that President-elect Donald Trump won from ABC News on Saturday is a major embarrassment for George Stephanopoulos, the former whiz kid Clinton aide and ABC star whose on-air remarks led to the settlement—and whose outsized compensation has long caused disgruntlement at ABC amid an accelerating ratings decline.
On Saturday, ABC agreed to donate $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library and to reimburse Trump for $1 million in legal fees. Stephanopoulos also agreed to apologize for his on-camera remarks made on his Sunday morning show, This Week, where he repeatedly badgered Rep. Nancy Mace (R., S.C.) by falsely stating that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” ABC added a written apology to its online story about the Mace interview.
The legal agreement shows signatures from Debra O’Connell, the executive in charge of ABC News, and Stephanopoulos himself, who signed electronically with three crudely written initials.
The settlement comes as Good Morning America, where Stephanopoulos is one of a triumvirate of ultra-high-compensated cohosts, faces a ratings free fall. Ratings for GMA and its archrival, Today, have both fallen more than 50 percent over the last decade (Stephanopoulos has been a cohost for that whole time period). Most recently, GMA has lost out in total viewers to Today for five consecutive weeks between November and December. GMA is one of ABC’s most lucrative shows, even after the sharp ratings decline.
It’s unclear how badly the ratings collapse has affected the show’s profits. Many advertisers have remained loyal to broadcast TV programming despite plummeting ratings, as they find their alternatives—digital advertising—unpalatable.
It was against that backdrop that Stephanopoulos’s agents sat for negotiations with ABC’s top brass earlier this month, with the reported three-year deal Stephanopoulos signed in 2021 set to expire. His total compensation package in that deal was believed to be worth about $25 million a year. The well-connected Hollywood journalist Matt Belloni recently reported on his podcast The Town that the three GMA cohosts—Stephanopoulos, Robin Roberts, and Michael Strahan—together make $75 million. He also said Disney—which owns ABC—should “fire them” to remove a wasteful expenditure.
Industry observers had expected ABC to at least trim Stephanopoulos’s exorbitant salary as part of an industry-wide trend of television networks demanding concessions from their highest-paid news stars. The biggest star of Today, Hoda Kotb, announced she would resign earlier this year after NBC reportedly demanded she take a substantial pay cut (Kotb, a single mom, said she wanted to spend more time with her adopted children). Norah O’Donnell, the anchor of the low-rated CBS Evening News, announced she would transition to a new, diminished role after reportedly being told she’d have to take a huge pay cut. Chris Wallace, the former Fox News star, also announced he was leaving CNN, reportedly after facing a significant pay cut.
But according to NewsNation columnist Paula Froelich, a well-sourced veteran of the New York Post’s Page Six, Stephanopoulos inked a multiyear extension on Dec. 6 that’s “similar to the last deal” —and the rank and file at ABC is incensed.
“The staff is furious,” one source told Froelich. “It’s like a third-world country over there where the top .01 percent make all the money and the rest of the people get peanuts.”
The Post reported earlier this month that GMA staff are dealing with broken WiFi and heat at their “decrepit” offices. ABC is slowly migrating employees to Disney’s new headquarters in downtown Manhattan, and the GMA staff is still in the old Upper West Side complex, which is being neglected as it’s slated for demolition to make way for a super-luxury condominium tower.
The defamation settlement, announced on Saturday as Trump enjoyed the Army-Navy football game with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and the recently acquitted Daniel Penny, will almost certainly exacerbate the frustration at ABC. It also reflects the bumpy path ahead for the network and its liberal competitors.
Stephanopoulos’s compensation has long been a sore point at ABC. Staff are puzzled as to why the diminutive news star is paid so much to cohost a lighthearted morning show where he’s long been a fish out of water—and where ABC once had to install an opaque panel under the anchor desk to hide his dangling legs. His much taller cohosts, Roberts and Strahan, are popular with the daytime audience that’s the core of GMA’s 8 a.m. hour, which is filled with weight loss segments, celebrity interviews, and promotion for other ABC and Disney programming.
Stephanopoulos, by contrast, is largely limited to doing “hard news” segments in the 7 a.m. hour, which contains GMA’s more serious news segments. He often works a short week on GMA so he can host This Week, where he made the defamatory comments about Trump.
Stephanopoulos’s close ties to Democratic presidential administrations may have gone into Disney’s calculations. Obama and Biden’s most powerful chiefs of staff, Rahm Emmanuel and Ron Klain, were Stephanopoulos’s mentees during the Clinton administration, and Stephanopoulos reportedly remains close to them. But with Trump returning to power, his utility to Disney’s C-suite in Burbank has faded.
ABC’s decision to settle Trump’s lawsuit is a bad omen for fellow media companies CNN and NBCUniversal, which are also facing serious defamation lawsuits.
CNN and MSNBC, which are experiencing their own tumbling ratings in the wake of Trump’s win, are being sued for defamation in Florida and Georgia, respectively. The embarrassing lawsuits could levy enormous judgments from red-state courtrooms.
CNN and star anchor Jake Tapper are set to go to trial next month in a major suit brought by a Navy veteran who says the network made false claims about his efforts to get Afghans out of the country amid the Taliban’s 2021 takeover. Earlier this year, meanwhile, a judge ruled that MSNBC’s biggest stars—including Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, and Chris Hayes—made “verifiably false” claims about a doctor who works in a Georgia migrant facility. Both suits are already in the deposition phase, where the defendants must disgorge internal emails and texts and sit for questioning from the plaintiff’s attorneys.
Courts require a higher threshold for public figures like Trump to prove defamation—one that the plaintiffs in the CNN and MSNBC cases will not have to meet. And those plaintiffs appear to have more legitimate grievances than Trump.
At issue in the ABC suit was legal minutiae surrounding the word “rape.”
During his March interview, Stephanopoulos repeatedly asked Mace why, as a self-professed sexual assault victim, she continued to support Trump after a Manahttan jury found him “liable for rape” in writer E. Jean Carroll’s 2023 civil case against him. The jury actually found him liable for “sexual abuse,” which has a separate legal definition in New York. In fact, on the jury verdict questionnaire, the jury checked off that it did not find Trump liable for rape. Nevertheless, Judge Lewis Kaplan later wrote that even though Carroll did not prove rape “within the meaning of the New York Penal Law,” that “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.'”
In a different environment, ABC’s lawyers might have expected to prevail in court—Trump frequently sues his enemies and is rarely successful. And in a defamation case involving a public figure, Trump’s attorneys would need to prove that ABC acted with “malice.” Kaplan’s remarks gave ABC considerable wiggle room.
But Trump had brought the suit in Florida, where courtrooms can be hostile to New York media organizations—especially at a time when the media are under intense scrutiny following the 2024 election, dogged by allegations that it covered up for Biden’s cognitive decline. The judge’s rulings in the case had been consistently hostile to ABC.
The CNN and MSNBC cases appear more clear cut in the plaintiff’s favor.
CNN, for its part, accused Navy veteran Zachary Young of operating within an illegal “black market” when he charged fees to evacuate Afghans during the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal. The network has since acknowledged Young did not break any laws. Internal CNN emails gleaned from discovery show network journalists excited at the prospect of bringing Young down, even as CNN’s internal fact checking department expressed doubt about the report’s integrity.
MSNBC, meanwhile, accused the Georgia doctor, gynecologist Mahendra Amin, of performing “mass hysterectomies” on women housed at a Trump-era immigration facility in the Peach State, calling Amin “the uterus collector.” Their source was a disgruntled nurse at the facility who later admitted her claims were based on hearsay, and a Senate probe found that Amin performed just two hysterectomies that were “deemed medically necessary” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Internal emails procured by the plaintiff during discovery showed that NBC News’s internal standards department, which reviews controversial content, doubted the whistleblower’s credibility but still approved the piece for air.
Both Tapper and Maddow were deposed in those cases, and eventual settlements could come as Comcast prepares to offload MSNBC and as CNN braces for layoffs and budget cuts. Maddow saw her salary slashed shortly before Comcast announced the MSNBC spinoff (she reportedly took a $5 million annual cut, and will now earn only $25 million a year to work four days a week).
During Tapper’s deposition, the plaintiff’s attorneys asked Tapper to divulge his salary, and he refused. It’s unclear if the judge will force CNN to divulge the information. The plaintiffs have demanded reams of financial data from CNN, and the judge seems open to compelling the network to cough up.
The ABC settlement marks an exceptionally rare case in which a national news organization paid eight figures to a major public figure for defamation.
It’s unlikely that Stephanopoulos will be asked to pay for any of the settlement out of his own pocket, given that top networks like ABC routinely carry liability insurance for defamation and libel cases. Stephanopoulos’s contract also likely promises that ABC will indemnify him for any lawsuits brought about in the course of his work. Still, the large payment could negatively impact salary negotiations for producers and other lower-compensated staff who lack Stephanopoulos’s mysterious leverage.
Strahan and Roberts, who also earn around $25 million a year, have more than a year remaining on their contracts, according to the Wall Street Journal.
ABC did not respond to a request for comment.
Original News Source – Washington Free Beacon
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