AP Photo/Ben Gray
- A Delaware judge has rejected Fox News’ motion to dismiss Dominion’s defamation lawsuit.
- The voting systems company sued Fox News in March 2021 for airing election fraud lies.
- The judge said it’s “reasonably conceivable that Dominion has a claim for defamation.”
A Delaware judge rejected Fox News’ request to throw out Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against the conservative media giant on Thursday.
The decision opens the door for the company to obtain internal communications and other evidence from the network. A settlement is also a more likely outcome now that the motion to dismiss is off the table.
“For purposes of the Motion, the Court must view all well-pled facts alleged in the Complaint as true and in a light most favorable to Dominion,” Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis wrote in the ruling.
On March 26, 2021, Dominion filed the defamation lawsuit against Fox News seeking $1.6 billion in damages, claiming that the network gave prominence to the election-fraud claims as a tactic to revive viewership as ratings dropped after President Donald Trump’s loss.
Dominion manufactures and sells electronic voting hardware, software, and voting machines, and was repeatedly targeted with conspiracies in the wake of the 2020 election.
Specifically, in its suit Dominion claimed that Fox News “sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.”
Two months later, Fox News filed to dismiss the motion.
The only Fox News host directly implicated in the lawsuit is Maria Bartiromo. Two of Trump’s attorneys who led his efforts to overturn the results of the election, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, also made false election fraud claims on Fox News and have been separately sued for defamation by both Dominion and Smartmatic.
Powell responded to Dominion’s lawsuit against her by tweeting that the lawsuit “is baseless & filed to harass, intimidate, & to drain our resources as we seek the truth of #DominionVotingSystems‘ role in this fraudulent election.” Giuliani said in a statement that he welcomed Dominion’s lawsuit against him, suggesting that he had not previously done a thorough investigation of Dominion’s practices.
In Thursday’s ruling, Davis wrote that “Fox possessed countervailing evidence of election fraud from the Department of Justice, election experts, and Dominion at the time it had been making its statements.”
Davis wrote that in seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, Fox News contended that many of its hosts debunked election lies.
“Yet, certain Fox personnel (e.g., Mr. Dobbs) continued to push the fraud claims,” Davis wrote, appearing to reference former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs. “The nearby presence of dissenting colleagues thus further suggests Fox, through personnel like Mr. Dobbs, was knowing or reckless in reporting the claims.”
In his rejection, Davis wrote that the court found that it is “reasonably conceivable that Dominion has a claim for defamation per se.”
“As we have maintained, FOX News, along with every single news organization across the country, vigorously covered the breaking news surrounding the unprecedented 2020 election, providing full context of every story with in-depth reporting and clear-cut analysis,” a spokesperson for Fox told Insider in a statement. “We remain committed to defending against this baseless lawsuit and its all-out assault on the First Amendment.”
Insider reached out to Dominion for comment.
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