Fox News is facing another massive lawsuit over its conspiracy-addled 2020 election coverage. The network already stood to lose nearly $3 billion in a case filed by Smartmatic in February. Now, a suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, another election technology company, could bleed it of another another $1.6 billion.
Fox News “recklessly disregarded the truth,” Dominion alleged in a filing Friday, and profited from lies that resulted in “enormous and irreparable economic harm” for the company and in death threats for its employees. “The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawsuit read. “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 defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does,” the suit added.
Donald Trump spent months attacking the integrity of the 2020 election, including by spreading bogus conspiracy theories that faulty or rigged voting machines contributed to his loss to Joe Biden. Those lies were taken up by people like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who are also facing big-dollar defamation suits from the company, and his allies in the media. (Powell this week put forth an unusual defense against her own Dominion suit, arguing that “no reasonable person” would conclude her wild claims were “truly statements of fact.”) Fox gave a particularly big platform to the voting machine lies, with prominent anchors like Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs advancing Trump’s baseless claims.
Smartmatic, one of the companies targeted with the conspiracies, filed a suit last month against Fox News and Fox Business Network, naming Bartiromo, Dobbs, and other hosts as defendants. Fox immediately moved to dismiss that suit, claiming it was simply covering Trump’s election claims—not promoting them. “This lawsuit strikes at the heart of the news media’s First Amendment mission to inform on matters of public concern,” the network said in its motion to dismiss the earlier suit. Fox similarly defended its coverage in response to the Dominion suit, saying through a spokesman that it was “proud” of its 2020 coverage and promising to “vigorously defend” itself against what it called a “baseless” suit.
Fox hosts—including MAGA favorites Bartiromo, Dobbs, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Jeanine Pirro, all of whom are named in the Dominion suit—did more than cover the former president’s allegations. They actively promoted them, and after Smartmatic in December issued a demand for retraction, Dobbs aired a segment in which he debunked the very conspiracy theories he pushed. “Fox took a small flame,” the Dominion suit read, and “turned it into a forest fire” as “part of an orchestrated defamatory campaign” against the company. “As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results,” the suit continued, “Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved.”
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