Dominion Sues Fox News For $1.6 Billion Over 2020 Election ‘Lies’
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Dominion Voting Systems, a company subject to a torrent of conspiracy theories from President Donald Trump and his allies seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, has sued Fox News for $1.6 billion, alleging the network falsely claimed Dominion rigged the 2020 election.
That campaign to overturn the election — which was roundly rejected by courts but embraced by pro-Trump media — culminated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, in which a horde of Trump supporters violently interrupted the certification of the 2020 vote by Congress.
Dominion accused Fox, which is facing another $2.7 billion lawsuit from election technology firm Smartmatic, of spreading false claims that the company helped rig the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.
Fox News filed a motion to dismiss the Smartmatic suit. In response to Dominion, Fox said in a statement, “FOX News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”
The lawsuit cited a number of Fox News stars as having pushed false statements, including Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro.
“Fox, one of the most powerful media companies in the United States, gave life to a manufactured storyline about election fraud that cast a then-little known voting machine company called Dominion as the villain,” the suit stated. It argues that after “viewers began fleeing Fox in favor of media outlets endorsing the lie that massive fraud caused President Trump to lose the election,” the network “set out to lure viewers back—including President Trump himself— by intentionally and falsely blaming Dominion for President Trump’s loss by rigging the election.”
The lawsuit noted that Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and that Fox News knew the claims made about Dominion were “lies.”
A spokesman from Dominion even appeared on Fox News last November, as conspiracies about the company began to take hold. In an interview with Fox News anchor Eric Shawn, Dominion spokesman Michael Steel debunked allegations of fraud regarding 2020. Still, Dominion pointed out in its lawsuit that false claims about the company continued to be aired on the network in the months that followed.
“Fox endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion,” the suit stated. Those lies, according to Dominion, included the following:
(1) Dominion committed election fraud by rigging the 2020 Presidential Election; (2) Dominion’s software and algorithms manipulated vote counts in the 2020 Presidential Election; (3) Dominion is owned by a company founded in Venezuela to rig elections for the dictator Hugo Chávez; and (4) Dominion paid kickbacks to government officials who used its machines in the 2020 Presidential Election.
“The truth matters,” the suit stated. “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 defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”
Read the full complaint below.
Dominion v. Fox News Complaint by on Scribd
This story has been updated with a statement from Fox News.
