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Paramount has agreed to pay $16mn to settle President Donald Trump’s $20bn defamation lawsuit against its CBS News division, potentially clearing an obstacle as Shari Redstone seeks to move ahead with the sale of her family’s company to Skydance.
The payment will be made to Trump’s future presidential library, marking the second time since the November election that he has won damages from a major news organisation. In December, Disney-owned ABC paid $15mn to Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation suit.
The announcement comes as Paramount prepares to hold its annual shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday, where it was to install three new board members. Paramount and Skydance face a deadline to complete a merger by July 7. The companies have an automatic 90-day extension if needed.
The merger deal has faced months of scrutiny from Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, which would need to approve the transaction. Carr has denied that Trump’s CBS lawsuit influenced his deliberation over the Paramount-Skydance deal.
Paramount said in a statement that the settlement of the Trump lawsuit was “completely separate from, and unrelated to, the Skydance transaction and the FCC approval process”. The two sides are expected to formalise the settlement agreement over the next 10 days.
Paramount noted that the settlement did not include a statement of apology or regret.
The company’s willingness to settle the suit has sparked concern among free-speech advocates, who say Trump’s case would not have stood up to a challenge under First Amendment protection for the press.
Trump alleged that CBS’s 60 Minutes news programme defamed him by editing a portion of an interview with then-vice president Kamala Harris in a way that he claimed was deliberately deceptive.
Talk of a potential settlement angered journalists at CBS, prompting the resignation of the network’s chief executive and a longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes.
In a court filing on June 23, lawyers for CBS called the Trump suit “meritless” and accused the president of attempting to “evade bedrock First Amendment principles” allowing free speech.
In May, the settlement discussions prompted senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to express “serious concern” that Paramount might be “engaging in improper conduct” by moderating the content of its programmes to win approval of the Skydance deal.
“If Paramount officials make these concessions in a quid pro quo arrangement to influence President Trump or other Administration officials, they may be breaking the law,” the senators warned in a letter. “Under the federal bribery statute, it is illegal to corruptly give anything of value to public officials to influence an official act.”
Redstone recused herself from the board’s deliberations over how to resolve the case, which has been the subject of months of mediation between Paramount and Trump’s lawyers.
The case has been an obstacle for Redstone, who stands to reap a windfall from the $8.4bn sale of Paramount to Skydance, a smaller Hollywood studio founded by David Ellison with backing from his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
In the suit, Trump contended that CBS sought to “tip the scales in favour of the Democratic party” during the 2024 election by airing two different edits of answers Harris gave to a question.
Trump accused 60 Minutes of editing the segment in a way that would “paper over Kamala’s ‘word salad’ weakness”.
CBS said its Face the Nation programme used a longer clip of Harris’s answer, while 60 Minutes used a shorter edit from the same interview to save time — a common practice in broadcast journalism.
The company said 60 Minutes would release transcripts of future interviews with US presidential candidates after they air.
