Dominion, Fox News settle defamation suit for stunning $787M, averting trial
Dominion Voting Systems agreed to settle its billion dollar defamation lawsuit against Fox News Tuesday, ending what had promised to be a high-stakes trial before it began.
One day after the trial was originally scheduled to begin, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis informed jurors, who had been sworn in only hours earlier, that “The parties have resolved their case.”
“Your presence here … was extremely important,” Davis told the jury. “And without you, the parties would not have been able to resolve the situation.”
At a press conference outside the courthouse, attorneys for Dominion said they’d reached an agreement with Fox’s lawyers to settle the suit for $787.5 million — less than the $1.6 billion in damages Dominion had been seeking.
“The truth matters," Dominion lawyer Justin Nelson said in a news conference outside the courthouse after the announcement. "Lies have consequences.”
In a statement, Fox News said the network is "pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects FOX's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards."
The case centered on a number of false claims and baseless conspiracy theories that Fox News hosts and guests made on air in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, which alleged that Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company, had rigged voting machines to help Joe Biden steal the election from then-President Donald Trump.
In pretrial filings, Dominion revealed that it had obtained a wealth of evidence, including emails, text messages and deposition testimony, revealing that top Fox executives and hosts had privately cast doubt on Trump’s claims about rigged Dominion machines. Various Fox News personalities, from hosts like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, and even Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, were expected to be called to testify at the trial.
In the landmark 1964 ruling New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court set a particularly high bar for public figures who seek to bring libel cases against media organizations, requiring them to prove that defamatory statements were made with “actual malice” or that the defendant knew they were false at the time or acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth.
This standard, which is extremely difficult to meet, is meant to give media outlets freedom to make mistakes while reporting on newsworthy events, as long as they don’t do so deliberately. Fox has argued that its coverage of Trump’s voter fraud allegations should be covered by the First Amendment, accusing Dominion in a statement of taking “an extreme view of defamation law that would stop the media in its tracks.”
Ahead of the trial, Judge Davis poked holes in Fox’s defense, ruling that Dominion had successfully proved that the statements in question were false, meaning that a jury would have to decide only whether Fox should be liable for broadcasting them.
