YouTube has agreed to pay Donald Trump $24.5 million after preventing him from posting new videos to his channel after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots.
According to the filing, $22 million will be used to support Trump’s construction of a White House State Ballroom and will be held in a tax-exempt entity called the Trust for the National Mall.
Another $2.5 million will go to the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit — including the American Conservative Union, Andrew Baggiani, Austen Fletcher, Maryse Veronica Jean-Louis, Frank Valentine, Kelly Victory and Naomi Wolf — according to the filing.
“This Notice of Settlement and Stipulation of Dismissal shall not constitute an admission of liability or fault on the part of the Defendants or their agents, servants, or employees, and is entered into by all Parties for the sole purpose of compromising disputed claims and avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigation,” the filing stated.
YouTube suspended Trump’s account following the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, saying at the time that an uploaded video violated its policy for inciting violence. It restored Trump’s channel more than two years later, citing that voters could “hear equally from major national candidates in the run-up to an election.”
Trump’s lawsuit alleged that YouTube prevented him from “exercising his constitutional right of free speech” by banning him indefinitely from the platform.
YouTube, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, is the latest social media company to agree to settle with Trump this year over the suspension of his accounts following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Meta agreed to settle with Trump by making a donation of $22 million to his presidential library and paying $3 million in legal fees in January.
The Wall Street Journal quotes Trump lawyer John P. Coale, who brought the suits with lead litigation attorney John Q. Kelly.
“If he had not been re-elected, we would have been in court for 1,000 years,” Coale said, suggesting that Trump’s return to power motivated the social media companies to settle. “It was his re-election that made the difference.”
The report said the settlement comes as Google is “under pressure from the Justice Department to break up its ad businesses after a federal judge ruled this spring that the company had created a monopoly in advertising.”
