Davis of Delaware Superior Court denied a motion from Fox that would have excluded the parent Fox Corporation from the case - a much larger target than Fox News itself. In its initial complaint, the company’s lawyers wrote that “The truth matters,” adding, “Lies have consequences.” Asked about Dominion’s strategy to place the Murdochs front and center in the case, a Fox Corporation spokesman said it would be a “fruitless fishing expedition.” A spokeswoman for Fox News said it was “ridiculous” to claim, as Dominion does in the suit, that the network was chasing viewers from the far-right fringe.įox is expected to dispute Dominion’s estimated self-valuation of $1 billion and argue that $1.6 billion is an excessively high amount for damages, as it has in a similar defamation case filed by another voting machine company, Smartmatic.Ī spokesman for Dominion declined to comment. And Fox is arguing, in part, that’s what shields it from liability. But it does leave room for the media to cover newsworthy figures who tell them. In court filings and depositions, Dominion lawyers have laid out how they plan to show that senior Fox executives hatched a plan after the election to lure back viewers who had switched to rival hard-right networks, which were initially more sympathetic than Fox was to Mr. The hosts Steve Doocy, Dana Perino and Shepard Smith are among the current and former Fox personalities who either have been deposed or will be this month.ĭominion is trying to build a case that aims straight at the top of the Fox media empire and the Murdochs. Anchors and executives have been preparing for depositions and have been forced to hand over months of private emails and text messages to Dominion, which is hoping to prove that network employees knew that wild accusations of ballot rigging in the 2020 election were false. The case has caused palpable unease at the Fox News Channel, said several people there, who would speak only anonymously. These people said they expected Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, who own and control the Fox Corporation, to sit for depositions as soon as this month. The two companies are deep into document discovery, combing through years of each other’s emails and text messages, and taking depositions. There have been no moves from either side toward a settlement, according to interviews with several people involved in the case. If they do go forward, they are usually settled out of court to spare both sides the costly spectacle of a trial.īut Dominion’s $1.6 billion case against Fox has been steadily progressing in Delaware state court this summer, inching ever closer to trial. And such suits are often quickly dismissed, because of the First Amendment’s broad free speech protections and the high-powered lawyers available to a major media company like Fox. But Dominion’s complaint is replete with example after example of false statements, many of them made after the facts were widely known. Defamation claims typically involve a single disputed statement. Those bogus assertions - made day after day, including allegations that Dominion was a front for the communist government in Venezuela and that its voting machines could switch votes from one candidate to another - are at the center of the libel suit, one of the most extraordinary brought against an American media company in more than a generation.įirst Amendment scholars say the case is a rarity in libel law. Those unfounded accusations are now among the dozens cited in Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against the Fox Corporation, which alleges that Fox repeatedly aired false, far-fetched and exaggerated allegations about Dominion and its purported role in a plot to steal votes from Mr. Maria Bartiromo, another host on the network, falsely stated that “Nancy Pelosi has an interest in this company.” Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News personality, speculated that “technical glitches” in Dominion’s software “could have affected thousands of absentee mail-in ballots.” Dobbs said, “were designed to be inaccurate.” That evidence never emerged but a new culprit in a supposed scheme to rig the election did: Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election technology whose algorithms, Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs claimed to have “tremendous evidence” that voter fraud was to blame.
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