Fox News faces 2nd defamation lawsuit
Dominion Voting Systems is seeking $1.6 billion
Fox News and its powerful owner, Rupert Murdoch, are facing a second major defamation suit over the network’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election, a new front in the growing legal battle over media disinformation and its consequences.
In the latest aftershock of former President Donald Trump’s attempt to undermine President Joe Biden’s victory, Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that was at the center of a baseless proTrump conspiracy about rigged voting machines, sued Fox News on Friday for advancing lies that devastated its reputation and business.
Dominion, which has requested a jury trial, is seeking at least $1.6 billion in damages. The lawsuit comes less than two months after Smartmatic, another election tech company, filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Murdoch’s Fox Corp. and named Fox anchors Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro as defendants.
In a 139-page complaint filed in Delaware Superior Court, Dominion portrayed Fox as an active player in spreading falsehoods that the company had altered vote counts and manipulated its machines to benefit Biden in the election.
Those claims were relentlessly pushed by Trump’s lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, in public forums, including multiple appearances on Fox programs.
In January, Dominion sued Giuliani and Powell for defamation. The company also sued Mike Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow and a Trump ally who was also a frequent guest on Fox and other conservative media outlets. Each of those suits seeks damages of more than $1 billion.
“The truth matters,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in Friday’s complaint against Fox. “Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of def-
amation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”
In a statement Friday, Fox said that its 2020 election coverage “stands in the highest tradition of American journalism” and pledged to “vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”
Dominion’s filing Friday represented what its lawyers called a new phase in its battle against its detractors, and Thomas A. Clare, part of the company’s legal team, said it was unlikely to be the last lawsuit filed. His firm, Clare Locke, has in recent weeks joined with the firm Susman Godfrey, which is known for taking cases to trial.
“We get in cases to try them,” said Stephen Shackelford, a partner at Susman Godfrey who is working on the Dominion case.
Fox Corp. previously filed a motion to dismiss the Smartmatic lawsuit, arguing that the false claims of electoral fraud made on its channels were part of covering a fast-breaking story of significant public interest.
“An attempt by a sitting president to challenge the result of an election is objectively newsworthy,” Fox wrote in its motion.
The narrative that Trump and his allies spun about Dominion was among the more baroque creations of the president’s monthslong effort to cast doubt on the 2020 election results and convince Americans that Biden’s victory was not legitimate.
Dominion, founded in 2002, is one of the largest manufacturers of voting machine equipment in the United States. Its equipment was used by election authorities in more than two dozen states last year, including several states carried by Trump.
Allies of Trump falsely portrayed Dominion as biased toward Biden and argued, without evidence, that it was tied to Hugo Chavez, the longdead Venezuelan dictator. John Poulos, Dominion’s founder, and other employees received harassing and threatening messages from people convinced that the company had undermined the election results, according to the complaint.
Fox News and Fox Business programs were among the mass-media venues where Trump’s supporters denounced Dominion. The lawsuit also cites examples of Fox hosts, including Bartiromo and Dobbs, uncritically repeating or vouching for false claims made by Giuliani and Powell.
“Fox took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire,” Dominion wrote in the lawsuit. “As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved.”
Dominion’s lawyers Friday also cited an unusual argument made by Powell in a motion, filed Monday, to dismiss the separate Dominion suit against her.
In that motion, Powell’s lawyers asserted that because political language is often inexact, “no reasonable person” would accept Powell’s baseless claims as facts. Powell’s motion essentially argues that her claims about Dominion’s voting machines were hyperbolic and therefore not defamatory.
Clare described Powell’s contention as “ridiculous,” but he said that it was now linked to the lawsuit filed Friday.
“Fox knew these were lies, but they made a deliberate decision to spread them to their enormous audience,” Clare said on a call with journalists.
Dominion says it recently lost major contracts with election officials in Georgia and Louisiana, adding that the company is now facing “the hatred, contempt, and distrust of tens of millions of American voters.”