The parent company of Fox News must face a defamation lawsuit regarding its election coverage.
(Reuters) – On Tuesday, a Delaware judge denied the parent company of Fox News Network’s plea to dismiss Dominion Voting Systems Inc‘s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit regarding the network’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election.
Judge Eric Davis of the Delaware Superior Court, who ruled in December that Dominion could sue Fox News Network, ruled that the voting machine manufacturer could also sue Fox Corp on the grounds that it was directly accountable for remarks made by the network.
Fox Corporation did not reply immediately to calls for comment. In a statement, Dominion said, “We are happy that this process to hold Fox accountable is moving forward.”
Dominion accused Fox of spreading unfounded claims that the company manipulated the 2020 election so that Republican Donald Trump would lose to Democrat Joe Biden in an effort to prevent audience defections to conservative rivals Newsmax and One America News.
Some theories were put forward by people working for Trump, like the lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who said that Hugo Chavez’s elections were rigged by using algorithms made in Venezuela.
Dominion alleged in court documents that Fox Corporation, through Chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son, Chief Executive Lachlan Murdoch, directly engaged in, approved, and directed the network’s coverage of the election and its aftermath.
Davis said that the claims made it “reasonable” to think that Fox Corp acted maliciously and directly caused Dominion’s alleged damages, but he didn’t make a decision on the merits.
The judge concluded, “Dominion has sufficiently alleged genuine malice against Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch.”
Davis also threw out a defamation case against Fox Broadcasting for putting the disputed claims on fox.com. He did this because there was no proof that anyone there was “subjectively aware of anything.”
Smartmatic, another company that makes voting machines, is suing Fox and a few Trump supporters for defamation and wants them to pay it billions of dollars.
The Delaware Superior Court heard the case of US Dominion Inc. et al. v. Fox Corp.
