James O'Keefe agrees to pay $100,000 settlement to fired Acorn employee

Self-styled "entrapment journalist" James O'Keefe has agreed to pay $100,000 to settle a lawsuit with a former employee of a social welfare agency who accused O'Keefe of misrepresenting him in a widely distributed video.

Juan Carlos Vera, who worked for the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), filed a federal lawsuit two years ago accusing O'Keefe of portraying him in a false light and filming him without his knowledge.

Vera sued over a video O'Keefe secretly shot of him inside the National City, California, offices of Acorn. In the video Vera appears to give O'Keefe and an accomplice, Hannah Giles, advice on setting up a prostitution ring.

What O'Keefe's video didn't show was that Vera contacted police after the meeting.

The settlement, first reported by Wonkette, states that "Mr O'Keefe regrets any pain suffered by Mr Vera or his family." It notes that the payment is "in no way representative of any actual or implied admissions of liability".

The statement of regret seemed to be undercut by a statement posted Friday on O'Keefe's website, Project Veritas, in which he calls the lawsuit "meritless".

O'Keefe's activism against Acorn led to a national controversy, the withdrawal of funding and ultimately the organization's demise.

O'Keefe has been sued before. He was named in an earlier $20,000 settlement paid to a Project Veritas employee who claimed wrongful termination.

The employee, Isabel Santa, was credited by then-CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau with warning her that O'Keefe was plotting to lure Boudreau onto a boat and make sexual advances as a way of humiliating her.

Another former Project Veritas employee said she had to threaten to call police to get O'Keefe to allow her to leave what she described as a barn in a remote location where he had brought her. After she published the account of her fight with O'Keefe the woman, Nadia Naffe, became the target of internet attacks.

O'Keefe was convicted of a misdemeanor and fined $1,500 in May 2010 after he dressed as a telephone repairman to get inside a local office of Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu. The guise did not work and he pleaded guilty to entering federal property under false pretenses.

"Sadly, this is the cost of exposing the truth," O'Keefe said by way of explaining the $100,000 settlement. "That's why so few people do it."