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Fox Settles Dominion Lawsuit For Historic $787.5 Million, Acknowledges Airing False Election Fraud Statements
© Photo: Julio Cortez (AP) A protester holds a sign near representatives of Fox News outside the justice center for the Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News, Tuesday, April 18, 2023, in Wilmington, Del.On Tuesday, Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems. This move brought an end to the lawsuit by the company which was riddled with on air claims from the network that they played a part in rigging a presidential election.
Originally, Dominion sought $1.6 billion and a few pretrial rulings had strengthened its case. However, Fox and its parent company, Fox Corp., opted to settle since having the suit being brought before a jury could have cost them more than $787.5 million.
The final amount paid by the cable network is the biggest publicly disclosed monetary settlement ever in a US defamation action. The agreement came with only an acknowledgment by Fox that it was wrong for constantly airing false statements that supported Donald Trump’s election fraud claims following the 2020 election. In a statement, Fox said:
“We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”
Fox hosts as well as the guests who appeared on a slew of their shows consistently pointed to Dominion as a key part in the 2020 election being wrongly in favor of Joe Biden. Both parties reached the agreement that was announced right after a jury was selected to hear the case. It was also shared just before opening arguments were scheduled to start in a superior court in Delaware (it happens to be Biden’s home state).
A lawyer for Dominion, Justin Nelson, spoke outside the courthouse after the deal was reached. “The truth has meaning. Lies have consequences.” He also remarked that the settlement “represents a ringing endorsement for truth and democracy.” The end of this case doesn’t mean an end for Fox’s legal troubles, though.
The network is still facing a defamation suit from a different voting-tech company, Smartmatic, which is seeking $2.7 billion in damages.
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Fox Settles Dominion Defamation Suit Over False Stolen-election Claims For $787 Million
WILMINGTON, Del. — Fox News agreed Tuesday to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to avert a trial in the voting machine company’s lawsuit that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election.
The stunning settlement emerged just as opening statements were scheduled to begin, abruptly ending a case that had embarrassed Fox News over several months and raised the possibility that network founder Rupert Murdoch and on-air personalities such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity would have to testify publicly.
“The truth matters,” Dominion lawyer Justin Nelson told reporters outside a Delaware courthouse after Superior Court Judge Eric Davis announced the deal. “Lies have consequences.”
Outside of the $787.5 million promised to Colorado-based Dominion, it was unclear what other consequences Fox would face. Fox acknowledged in a statement “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” but no apology was offered.
“We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues,” Fox said. Its lawyers and representatives offered no other comment or details about the settlement.
Asked by a reporter whether there was “anything to this other than money,” Dominion CEO John Poulos did not answer.
Dominion co–lead counsel Stephen Shackelford told MSNBC early Wednesday that a forced apology would not be particularly productive. “What we wanted was the truth to get out there.”
Shackelford said Fox News insiders were asked in depositions why there had not to that point been an on-air apology for the false claims against Dominion and responded under oath, Shackelford recalled, that it was “old news now — which is ironic.”
To those disappointed that Tuesday’s sudden settlement of the case meant that the truth of the matter would never fully penetrate the public consciousness, Shackelford suggested Dominion had purposefully made sure documents uncovered in the discovery process were revealed publicly — including internal conversations demonstrating that Fox insiders and on-air talent considered the frequently broadcast stolen-election claims unfounded and even unhinged — before entertaining a financial settlement.
“The number itself helps [harassed and threatened Dominion employees] prove to themselves, and prove to the world, exactly what Fox did and that Fox is taking some measure of accountability for it by paying out the largest defamation settlement in history.”
Don’t miss: 2020 election ‘was not stolen,’ Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch said under oath, according to evidence in Dominion case
The deal represents a significant amount of money even for a company the size of Fox. It represents about one-quarter of the $2.96 billion the company reported earning last year before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — a figure often used to approximate a company’s cash flow.
The settlement also follows a $965 million judgment issued last year against Alex Jones by a Connecticut jury for spreading false conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook school massacre.
Coupled with other lawsuits in the pipeline, the agreement shows there is a real financial risk for conservative media that traffic in conspiracy theories. What remains unknown is how much of a deterrent this will be. Even as the Dominion case loomed this spring, Fox’s Tucker Carlson aired his alternate theories about what happened at the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Dominion had sued Fox for $1.6 billion, arguing that the top-rated news outlet damaged the company’s reputation by peddling phony conspiracy theories that claimed its equipment switched votes from former President Donald Trump to Democrat Joe Biden. Davis, in an earlier ruling, said it was “CRYSTAL clear” that none of the allegations about Dominion aired on Fox by Trump allies were true.
Dominion set out to prove in the lawsuit that Fox acted with malice in airing allegations that it knew to be false, or with “reckless disregard” for the truth. It presented volumes of internal emails and text messages that showed Fox executives and personalities saying they knew the accusations were untrue, even as the falsehoods were aired on programs hosted by Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeannine Pirro.
Records released as part of the lawsuit showed that Fox aired the claims in part to win back viewers who were fleeing the network after it correctly called hotly contested Arizona for Democrat Joe Biden on election night. One Fox Corp. Vice president called them “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS.”
During a deposition, Murdoch testified that he believed the 2020 election was fair and had not been stolen from Trump.
“Fox knew the truth,” Dominion argued in court papers. “It knew the allegations against Dominion were ‘outlandish’ and ‘crazy’ and ‘ludicrous’ and ‘nuts.’ Yet it used the power and influence of its platform to promote that false story.”
Asked on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe” whether the settlement on Tuesday meant that people who consume only partisan-aligned news would never learn the truth of either the false claims against Dominion or more broadly about the conduct and outcome of the 2020 presidential election, co–lead counsel Shackelford replied, “I think that’s — I think that’s a shame.”
But, he said, expectations for the trial to serve as a watershed moment for a divided country were overdone. “You weren’t going to get Rupert Murdoch up on the stand admitting that he could have stopped this and he knew what was going on. He was going to say he had no idea. The [Fox News programs’] hosts were going to say they had an open mind, that they thought [the stolen-election claims being advanced by the Trump campaign and its allies] could be true.”
He said he had had a preview of the Fox News legal team’s opening statement, and “they were going to come into that courtroom and they were going to gaslight.”
Several First Amendment experts said Dominion’s case was among the strongest they had ever seen. But there was real doubt about whether Dominion would be able to prove to a jury that people in a decision-making capacity at Fox could be held responsible for the network’s actions.
Dominion’s Nelson called the settlement “a tremendous victory” and noted that there are six more lawsuits pending regarding election claims.
“We settled because it was about accountability,” Nelson said in an interview. “Our goals were to make sure that there was accountability for the lies, and to try to make our client right. And we accomplished both goals.”
Fellow Dominion lawyer Shackelford said Fox News had admitted “at least in the lawsuit” to spreading falsehoods, by conceding to the judge’s ruling — “which rules that they were telling lies” — and not opposing the facts of the Dominion legal team’s motion for summary judgment earlier this year. “They still have the opportunity [to make a more public accounting of the Fox News role in the spreading of false stolen-election claims],” he added.
“It’s vindication,” observed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican targeted since the 2020 election by Trump allies claiming state officials in Georgia facilitated a theft of the election in that state, which President Joe Biden won by 11,779 votes.
“We’ve been saying this for over 2½ years — that we had an honest and fair election in Georgia,” Raffensperger said in an MSNBC interview on Wednesday.
From the archives (March 2023): Georgia grand jury heard recording of another Trump call seeking to overturn election loss
Also see (January 2023): Atlanta-area grand jury wraps up probe of Trump and allies’ alleged effort to overturn Biden win in 2020
It’s hard to tell precisely what the deal will mean financially for Dominion. The company would not provide access to its most recent earnings, saying the figures were not public.
In the weeks leading up to the trial, Davis significantly narrowed Fox’s potential line of defense, including nixing the network’s argument that it was merely airing newsworthy allegations. Newsworthiness is not a defense against defamation, he said.
In a March 31 ruling, he pointedly called out the network for airing falsehoods while noting that bogus election claims still persist more than two years after Trump lost his bid for re-election.
“The statements at issue were dramatically different than the truth,” Davis said in that ruling. “In fact, although it cannot be attributed directly to Fox’s statements, it is noteworthy that some Americans still believe the election was rigged.”
In its defense, Fox said it was obligated to report on a president who claimed that he had been cheated out of re-election.
“We never reported those to be true,” Fox lawyer Erin Murphy said. “All we ever did was provide viewers the true fact that these were allegations that were being made.”
Dominion had sued both Fox News and its parent, Fox Corp., and said its business had been significantly damaged. Fox said Dominion had grossly overestimated its financial losses, before agreeing to pay about half of what Dominion had asked for.
In a 1964 case involving the New York Times, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the ability of public figures to sue for defamation. The court ruled that plaintiffs needed to prove that news outlets published or aired false material with “actual malice” — knowing such material was false or acting with a “reckless disregard” for whether it was true.
That has provided news organizations with stout protection against libel judgments. Yet the nearly six-decade legal standard has come under attack by some on the political right in recent years, including Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who have argued for making it easier to win a libel case against the press.
“The larger importance of the settlement … is that the high level of protection for news media in a defamation case remains intact for now,” said Doreen Weisenhaus, an instructor of media law at Northwestern University.
Shackelford, the Dominion lawyer, agreed on Wednesday that the bar for proving defamation by a media outlet is high and should remain so. “It’s hard because we want our free press to have the freedom to report and make mistakes, but this case wasn’t about mistakes. This case was about deliberate deception over and over and over and over again.”
In documents released in recent months, Fox executives and anchors discussed how not to alienate their audience, much of which had come to believe Trump’s claims of fraud despite no evidence to back those claims up. Fox host Tucker Carlson suggested a Fox reporter be fired for tweeting a fact check debunking the fraud claims.
Some of the exhibits were simply embarrassing, such as scornful behind-the-scenes opinions about Trump, whose supporters form the core of the network’s viewers. Text exchanges revealed as part of the lawsuit show Carlson declaring, “I hate him passionately,” and saying that “we are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights.”
Fox News announced the settlement on Neil Cavuto’s afternoon news show. “It’s a done deal,” he said. “It’s a settlement, and, for at least Fox, it appears to be over.”
But Fox’s legal problems are not over. It still faces a defamation lawsuit from another voting-technology company, Smartmatic. Its lawyer, Erik Connolly, said Tuesday that “Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest.”
Shackelford said the Dominion case moved more quickly than other current cases against Fox over the 2020 election, but “the truth is going to get out there for all of them, too.”
Fox News parent Fox Corp. And News Corp parent of MarketWatch publisher Dow Jones, share common ownership.
MarketWatch contributed.
Related stories:
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Judge in Fox News defamation case angered by revelation of Murdoch’s role
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity among potential witnesses at Fox News trial
Top congressional Democrats Schumer and Jeffries seek on-air acknowledgements that Fox News personalities knew Trump lost and election wasn’t stolen
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Fox Settles Dominion Lawsuit For $787.5 Million Over US Election Lies
© Thomson Reuters Fox settles Dominion defamation lawsuit for $787.5 million, avoiding trial, in WilmingtonBy Helen Coster and Jack Queen
WILMINGTON, Delaware (Reuters) -Fox Corp and Fox News on Tuesday settled a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million, averting a trial putting one of the world's top media companies in the crosshairs over its coverage of false vote-rigging claims in the 2020 U.S. Election.
© Thomson Reuters Fox settles Dominion defamation lawsuit for $787.5 million, avoiding trial, in WilmingtonThe settlement, which legal experts said was the largest struck by an American media company, was announced by the two sides and the judge in the case at the 11th hour.
The jury had been selected earlier in the day and the trial poised for opening statements in Wilmington, Delaware. Dominion had sought $1.6 billion in damages in the lawsuit filed in 2021.
© Thomson Reuters Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox in WilmingtonDominion CEO John Poulos called the settlement "historic."
"Fox has admitted to telling lies about Dominion that caused enormous damage to my company, our employees and our customers," Poulos said in a statement.
"Truthful reporting in the media is essential to our democracy," Poulos said.
At issue in the lawsuit was whether Fox was liable for airing the false claims that Denver-based Dominion's ballot-counting machines were used to manipulate the presidential election in favor of Democrat Joe Biden over then-President Donald Trump, a Republican.
Tuesday's settlement spared Fox the peril of having some of its best-known figures called to the witness stand and subjected to potentially withering questioning, including executives such as Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old who serves as Fox Corp chairman, as well as on-air hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro.
Fox anchor Neil Cavuto broke into his news show "Your World" about 4:30 p.M. Eastern Time to report the settlement. A statement by Fox was read on air.
© Thomson Reuters Jury selection continues in Dominion's $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox"We are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems," the statement said. "We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects FOX's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues."
© Thomson Reuters Jury selection continues in Dominion's $1.6 billion lawsuit against FoxFOX HAS BILLIONS IN CASH
Shares of Fox Corp closed up slightly at $34 per share, but were down 1% in after-hours trading following disclosure of the settlement amount. Fox has cash on hand to pay for a settlement. It committed $3 billion to buy back shares in the first quarter after revenues beat estimates. Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch told Wall Street analysts in February that the company had about $4 billion cash on hand.
© Thomson Reuters Jury selection continues in Dominion's $1.6 billion lawsuit against FoxDominion lawyers declined to answer questions about whether Fox News would apologize publicly or make changes.
Fox News is the most-watched U.S. Cable news network.
The settlement of $787.5 million is the largest amount of money paid to conclude an American media libel case, said Richard Tofel, principal of Gallatin Advisory. The previously highest payment occurred in 2017 when Walt Disney Co paid $177 million, in addition to insurance recoveries, to settle the "pink slime" defamation case against its ABC network by Beef Products Inc.
Legal experts weigh in on Fox's settlement with Dominion
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Dominion sued Fox Corp and Fox News, contending that its business was ruined by the false vote-rigging claims that were aired by the news outlet known for its roster of conservative commentators. The trial was to have tested whether Fox's coverage crossed the line between ethical journalism and the pursuit of ratings, as Dominion alleged and Fox denied. Fox had portrayed itself in the pretrial skirmishing as a defender of press freedom.
Fox settles Dominion defamation lawsuit for $787.5 million
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Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis, presiding over the case, had ordered a one-day trial postponement on Monday. Fox was pursuing settlement talks, two sources familiar with the matter said. Davis delayed the trial on Tuesday, as the two sides appeared to hammer out the deal in private.
The primary question for jurors was to be whether Fox knowingly spread false information or recklessly disregarded the truth, the standard of "actual malice" that Dominion must show to prevail in a defamation case.
In February court filings, Dominion cited a trove of internal communications in which Murdoch and other Fox figures privately acknowledged that the vote-rigging claims made about Dominion on-air were false. Dominion said Fox amplified the untrue claims to boost its ratings and prevent its viewers from migrating to other media competitors on the right.
ANOTHER LAWSUIT PENDING
Adding to the legal risks for Fox, another U.S. Voting technology company, Smartmatic, is pursuing its own defamation lawsuit seeking $2.7 billion in damages in a New York state court.
"For many plaintiffs, a court holding, and admission by the defendant about falsity, are even more important than any actual money damages," said Mary-Rose Papandrea, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
Fox had earlier argued that claims by Trump and his lawyers about the election were inherently newsworthy and protected by the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment. Davis ruled in March that Fox could not use those arguments as a defense, finding its coverage was false, defamatory and not protected by the First Amendment.
The lawsuit referenced instances in which Trump allies including his former lawyers Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell appeared on Fox News to advance the false allegations.
Murdoch internally described the election-rigging claims as "really crazy" and "damaging" but declined to wield his editorial power to stop them and conceded under oath that some Fox hosts nonetheless "endorsed" the baseless claims, Dominion told the court in a filing.
Under questioning from a Dominion lawyer, Murdoch testified that he thought everything about the election was on the "up-and-up" and doubted the rigging claims from the very beginning, according to Dominion's filing.
Asked if he could have intervened to stop Giuliani from continuing to spread falsehoods on air, Murdoch responded, "I could have. But I didn't," the filing said.
(Reporting by Helen Coster in Wilmington and Jack Queen in New York; writing by Tom Hals; editing by Will Dunham, Noeleen Walder and Grant McCool)
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