The Republican operative who accused American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp of sexual assault was paid $480,000 to drop the lawsuit, according to CNN and The Daily Beast.
Schlapp prior to the reports touted that his accuser had dropped the lawsuit and claimed he had been exonerated.
“From the beginning, I asserted my innocence,” Schlapp said in a statement on Tuesday. “Our family was attacked, especially by a left-wing media that is focused on the destruction of conservatives regardless of the truth and the facts.”
Schlapp’s lawyers also released a statement from Carlton Huffman, who accused Schlapp of groping him and making unwanted advances while he was working for Georgia Republican Herschel Walker’s failed Senate campaign.
“The claims made in my lawsuits were the result of a complete misunderstanding, and I regret that the lawsuit caused pain to the Schlapp family,” Huffman said, according to that statement. “Neither the Schlapps nor the ACU paid me anything to dismiss my claims against them.”
But multiple sources told CNN and The Daily Beast that Huffman received $480,000 through ACU’s insurance company.
The Daily Beast reported that Huffman had also “taken issue” with the content of the statement released in his name by Schlapp because “verbiage in that statement was not what Huffman had agreed to as part of the settlement.”
Huffman’s lawyer notified Schlapp’s legal team that the ACU chief’s social media posts celebrating his exoneration appeared to be in breach of their agreement’s nondisparagement clause, according to the report.
“I am only legally allowed to say five words, and that is ‘We have resolved our differences.’ Those are the only five words that I’m legally allowed to say,” Huffman told CNN when reached for comment.
A source familiar with discussions at ACU around the lawsuit told CNN that Schlapp and his wife settled because they “did not want this to go to trial, they simply did not want the testimony that would come out.”
“It’s not exoneration,” the source said, “if you paid the guy off.”
But the new allegations suggest the legal battle “might be heating back up almost as soon as it ended,” wrote The Daily Beast’s Roger Sollenberger.
