Producer of ABC’s ‘This Week With George Stephanopoulos’ Is Out a Year After Defamation Settlement With Trump

The executive producer of ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” has quietly exited the network a little over a year since ABC’s parent company, Disney, settled a defamation lawsuit with President Trump over false remarks Mr. Stephanopoulos made two years ago on his eponymous program.An ABC spokesman confirmed to Deadline that Brooke Brower, a veteran politics producer, was leaving the position after roughly three years on the job and at ABC. No replacement has been named. ABC declined to comment to the Sun.In December 2024, ABC agreed to pay $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit from Mr. Trump after Mr. Stephanopoulos, in March 2024, badgered a guest on the program, Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, by falsely and repeatedly saying the president had been found “liable for rape” in a civil case. Mr. Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in 2023 after the romance columnist E. Jean Carroll sued him, claiming he raped her in a dressing room on the lingerie floor of Bergdorf Goodman, the upscale Manhattan department store, some time in the mid-1990s. Mr. Trump denies ever knowing Ms. Carroll. While the civil jury found Mr. Trump liable only for sexual abuse, not rape, the judge later noted that New York’s law has a narrow definition of rape. At the time of the Disney settlement, the New York Post reported that, prior to the Mace interview, Mr. Brower had repeatedly warned Mr. Stephanopoulos not to use the word rape, yet Mr. Stephanopoulos, a former political operative for the Clintons, used it repeatedly – ten times – and with emphasis.Despite New York and Washington media referring repeatedly to the case as “frivolous,” the Florida judge presiding over Mr. Trump’s defamation lawsuit against ABC, Cecilia Altonaga, had dismissed the network’s motion to dismiss the case.Judge Altonaga said in her decision, “A reasonable jury could interpret Stephanopoulos’s statements as defamatory.”“Stephanopoulos stated ten times that a jury — or juries — had found plaintiff liable for rape,” she said. At the time of the settlement, the lawsuit had reached the discovery phase when ABC was obliged to disgorge internal emails, texts and other documents to Mr. Trump’s legal team. The documents could have shown Mr. Stephanopoulos’ level of culpability for the false statements. “‘This Week’ producer said ‘don’t use the word rape’ before the segment started,” an ABC source told the Post in December 2024. “The EP said it so many times.”“A second source at the show confirmed via a text message viewed by the Post that Stephanopoulos was warned ‘not to say rape,’” the article continued.Due to this settlement, what actually happened will probably never be public. The leaking against Mr. Stephanopoulos to the Post from inside ABC is unlikely to have gone over well at Disney. As part of the settlement, ABC released a statement that read, “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Representative Nancy Mace on ABC’s ‘This Week’ on March 10 of 2024.”

Producer of ABC’s ‘This Week With George Stephanopoulos’ Is Out a Year After Defamation Settlement With Trump

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