As I said in another comment, I feel certain (based on my own direct experience working for a publication that faced numerous lawsuits over what in those cases

As I said in another comment, I feel certain (based on my own direct experience working for a publication that faced numerous lawsuits over what in those cases were factual articles) that this was a condition of a legal settlement. And the thing is, you settle in this case because even though the defamation bar is really high, if your sourcing was wrong (and you maybe didn't do the best job of vetting that sourcing) and the more complicated aspect is that your source was later indicted in relation to a crime directly connected to the information they shared as the basis of that article, this seems like a pretty straightforward "settle it and move on" scenario, rather than trying to fight it in the courts. Barring the largesse of a large news organization (who also might choose to settle, as the Washington Post did with that kid in DC, even though the New York Times and others were years later found to not have defamed him), this is probably not the sort of thing you want to spend the potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting. Because at the end of the day, the reporting was still flawed.