Pushing nutty conspiracy theories to the masses over the airwaves can be a costly business, as Fox News might be about to find out the hard way. On Thursday, according to Variety, Delaware Superior Court judge Eric M. Davis denied Fox News’s motion to dismiss the $1.6 million defamation suit that was filed against the network in March of this year by Dominion Voting Systems, the election technology company that sells many of the voting machines Americans used to cast their vote in the 2020 presidential election.
In their original suit, according to Variety, Dominion alleged that, “Fox 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.”
Fox has vehemently denied these claims. Shortly after news of the original lawsuit broke, Fox News issued a statement in which they claimed: “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.”
While there’s still a long road ahead for both parties, some legal experts believe that the Superior Court siding with Dominion on the motion to dismiss could portend a rough road ahead for Fox, according to Raw Story. On Thursday, Anderson Cooper chatted with a panel of legal experts to get their take on the matter—and there seemed to be a general agreement that Fox could be in some serious doo-doo (yes, that’s proper legal jargon).
“By putting Rudy Giuliani [and] Sidney Powell, making these outrageous false allegations, on the air without allowing Dominion to refute them, that’s libel,” CNN’s chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said (yes, that Jeffrey Toobin). “And that’s what Fox is going to have to defend. And I don’t know how they’re going to defend it. I think it’s a very good case for the plaintiffs.”
John Dean, former White House Counsel to Richard Nixon, was surprised by the Delaware Supreme Court’s verdict. “Most of these cases get dismissed at this very early stage with a motion to dismiss,” he told Cooper. “I think that probably handles overwhelming number of defamation cases, because the standard is very unique. They have to show actual malice that was employed, meaning that they either knew it was false and went ahead with it or they did it with reckless disregard, they had some indication but yet they still went ahead.”
You can watch the full conversation above.
(Via Raw Story)