Disney, which owns ABC News, agreed to pay a $16 million settlement to Donald Trump to avoid a messy lawsuit that the company believed would have potentially damaged the Disney brand, ABC News, and potentially undermined First Amendment rights, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
Earlier this year, Trump launched a defamation lawsuit against ABC News over George Stephanopoulos’s use of the phrase “liable for rape” while discussing Trump’s E. Jean Carroll case verdict, which technically found Trump liable for sexual abuse, not rape.
It’s worth noting that even the presiding judge in the case thought the distinction between the two terms was semantic and wrote that the decision did not mean Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
Looking down the barrel of a major lawsuit, Disney decided to settle, and did so for three main reasons, according to the Times.
The first is that Disney had already engaged in culture-war lawsuits against Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis over Disney World, which resulted in criticism from Republican lawmakers and activists and boycotts from Trump supporters—undermining the family-friendly ubiquity of the $205 billion Disney brand name.
Disney was also concerned that as president, Trump would go after ABC News’s license. In September, Trump said that the network ought to lose its license after he was brutally fact-checked during a presidential debate. The Federal Communications Commission chair rejected this request, but Trump’s pick to lead the agency, Brendan Carr, doesn’t have quite the same hang-ups.
There was also some concern at Disney that the case would go all the way to the Supreme Court, which has a tendency to side with Trump, a move that could place one important precedent in jeopardy: 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan.
That ruling determined that when a public figure hopes to prove a member of the press committed libel against them, it’s not enough to show that the press made a false statement. They must also prove that the defendant did so with knowledge of or reckless disregard for the statement’s falsity.
Had Trump’s defamation case been tossed to the highest court in the land, it could have seen this essential protection for journalists undone. On the other hand, the settlement showed the president-elect exactly how he can silence the press during his second administration.