How Trump Felled Democratic Golden Boy George Stephanopoulos
George Stephanopoulos is famously meticulous. He does not slip up.
He used to arrive each day at 2:30 a.m. for Good Morning America, the show he has co-hosted for the past 15 years, so that “his face could settle” before going on air at 7 a.m. He would then monastically eat an apple at 9 a.m. after each show.
He runs, he works out, he meditates—he’s out of book parties before they’ve barely begun, and he sleeps early. The name of his and his wife Ali Wentworth’s production company is literal: Bed By 8.
Several executives describe him as among the smartest broadcasters they’ve worked with. He largely shed his partisan past as President Bill Clinton’s former top communications aide to emerge as a national news anchor cast consciously in the mold of Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, and David Brinkley; a voice of moral authority, intellectual integrity and establishment consensus.
So how has Stephanopoulos now cost his employer ABC News $15 million in damages and $1 million in legal fees after inaccurately describing Donald Trump as a rapist on-air during an interview in March?
“Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury,” Stephanopoulos repeatedly told Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) in a This Week interview in March—despite knowing that statement was arguable at best, if not outright wrong.
“You can’t be the smartest guy in the room and then make the dumbest mistake ten times,” says a former news producer.
There are two theories circulating among executives and broadcasters who know Stephanopoulos or have worked with him as to how he could have erred.
In one, he was undone by a moral righteousness that has driven his reaction to Trump since 2015, stretching the boundaries of what he knew to be true. In another, he made an honest, if repeated, error.
Some news executives suggest there was nothing accidental about his choice of words. He appeared to understand the verdict against Trump clearly last year when he interviewed E. Jean Carroll—the woman Trump was found to have sexually abused. He asked her on-air in May 2023 for her reaction to Trump having been “not found liable for rape.”
The judge in the case did however add an opinion two months after the Carroll interview, saying that while Trump had not been not found liable according to the state’s legal definition, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
The fact that Stephanopoulos is known to be deliberate in his choice of words posed a danger for Disney, those that know him say. If Stephanopoulos could be shown to have acted with reckless disregard for the truth, or malice, the network would be liable for defamation and damages. (His agent at CAA did not respond to requests for comment; ABC News declined to comment on the record.)
In court filings before the settlement, Disney never addressed whether Stephanopoulos acted deliberately; instead, it argued that the term “rape” was “substantially true.”
Whatever Stephanopoulos’ precise intent, industry insiders say his antipathy towards the president-elect is evident.
“Anybody who works at ABC knows that George hates him,” says a news executive. “It’s visceral. Trump violated everything George believed about how the presidential city should be run. It made him absolutely crazy. He couldn’t understand why the country wouldn’t reject him.”
Disney settled rather than adjudicating the case in court. The Beast understands that Stephanopoulos is saying privately to friends that he is relieved. As one TV insider from another network says, “Would I rather apologize and have somebody pay the $15 million, or go through discovery for two years and every text and email end up on the front page of the Daily Mail? I’d say, for most broadcast journalists, that’s an easy decision.”
But Stephanopoulos is well aware of the professional consequences of ABC’s capitulation, with the New York Post reporting that he is “apoplectic” and “humiliated”. Any private spin can’t mask his new public reality.
Indeed, multiple insiders who spoke to the Beast were surprised that Stephanopoulos agreed to apologize to Trump. Some wonder whether a new, imminent contract renewal helped to persuade him. (He was paid more than $100 million by ABC in the 2010s, and was earning $25 million a year under his current contract.)
Money matters to him, along with morality. He lives a life where the table stakes are high, one split between the Upper East Side, ABC’s Times Square studio, and the Hamptons—halcyon liberal worlds where status can disappear overnight. He dines with director J.J. Abrams and wears the merchandise of his friend Howard Stern.
After 500 weeks spent covering Trump’s ambitions, aims and outrages each weekday morning, Stephanopoulos has now been caught up in a political fight that’s bigger than him or his news network, which some observers believe Disney would gladly sell if they could.
Stephanopoulos could have walked. But, as one executive put in jest, “there are already 57 CNN anchors backed up at JFK trying to land.” There aren’t enough jobs around for moral stands.
That has left Stephanopoulos, who wished to be the great impartial anchor, wrestling with a loss in the value of his medium and metier, one which afflicted magazine journalists a decade ago and is now hitting the stars of television news.
Thirty years of relevance
By staying, Stephanopoulos is once again playing a role in a presidential administration. This time he begins as a defeated figure rather than an ascendent one: as he was—in various guises—under each of the last three Democratic presidents, Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Today he is an emblem of the legacy media’s humbled state ahead of Trump’s second term.
In his youth Stephanopoulos was the brilliant presidential aide whose life inspired The West Wing. Then he became the anchor America came to know, his career having played out in public since he was filmed trying to get Clinton elected in The War Room, the 1993 documentary that inspired a generation of political operatives including Steve Bannon, and was among Netflix’s most rented DVDs when it was still a mail order business. An early episode of Friends was named after him in 1994—he was 33.
The son of a Greek Orthodox priest, he was an unconventional liberal poster child for the 1990s, where within Clinton’s world he was part boy wonder, part whipping boy.
He wrote about his time in the White House to great acclaim in 1999 after breaking with the president over the Monica Lewinsky affair. The leap he made to covering the news set a path that later alums of Democratic presidencies, from Jon Favreau to Jen Psaki, would follow in their own ways.
This summer he landed a global scoop: Joe Biden’s last-gasp attempt to save his presidency after the debate that shattered his standing, interviewing the president for 22 fatal minutes.
He was picked for that sit-down, insiders say, after years of being “protective” towards the president. He was reluctant to cover thinly sourced stories that could hurt Biden; a position taken by many liberal journalists towards Democratic politicians throughout the Trump era.
His focus was on Trump, who he has long felt is a threat to democracy. Multiple sources describe him as enthused by the Mueller investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia, and the now discredited “Steele dossier.”
“He felt that was going to get [Trump],” says an executive at a rival network—a hope that many Democrats harbored during the president-elect’s first term.
Through it all, he has to deal with the rise of a rival anchor at ABC News: David Muir, the de facto face of the network since 2021—a broadcaster Stephanopoulos regards as his intellectual inferior: the triumph of dashing style over substance.
Stephanopoulos, a Rhodes scholar, went to Columbia. Muir, like Disney CEO Bob Iger but precious few others in the media industry, went to Ithaca College in upstate New York, in the shadow of Cornell.
For years Stephanopoulos had held ABC’s “chief anchor” role, a role hard won after he first replaced Diane Sawyer on GMA in 2009. In 2014, he coveted the famed World News Tonight chair and a move to the evening show after Sawyer stood down.
He did not get it. Muir did. Then, in 2021, Muir was handed the “chief anchor” title after Stephanopoulos was forced to relinquish it. Stephanopoulos felt deceived; he had been told no one would have it. He threatened to walk in fury.
Iger personally intervened in the deal Disney offered Stephanopoulos to stay: a pay rise, a production deal, and primetime shows. Muir still became the anchor of breaking news coverage, and election specials.
Stephanopoulos refused to sit next to him on air again, marginalizing himself as Muir alone anchored coverage of the 2022 midterms and this year’s presidential election.
Stephanopoulos remained on GMA, a show whose number one rating has held for 13 years—until the past five weeks, when NBC’s Today has begun to eclipse it. (Today already beats GMA in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demographic.)
That has left Stephanopoulos increasingly marooned on a declining morning show, whose populist segments, handled by his co-hosts, frustrate his political soul.
He does also present This Week (which bears his name) once a month on a Sunday, where he has combatively interviewed Trump allies, from then-Ohio senator JD Vance to Mace in the interview that has now cost ABC $16 million—along with four years of future ridicule from the right and a president who already calls him “Slopadopoulos.”
Trump will now invoke that insult whenever Stephanopoulos or ABC report on him, or attempt to cover his government. His $16m error, whatever the intent behind it, has dredged up another made earlier in Stephanopoulos’ career, in 2015, when he was revealed to have donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation—undermining the neutral on-air brand he had so assiduously created since leaving the White House.
That standing has now been undermined once again.
Stephanopoulos told The Late Show with Stephen Colbert shortly thereafter that he was “not going to be cowed out of doing my job because of the threat of Donald Trump.”
He has now chosen to stay at ABC. He has not been cowed out his job, perhaps, but cowed in it.
