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Dominion Voting Systems has filed a $1.6B defamation suit against Fox News and owner Rupert Murdoch over the network's coverage of the 2020 presidential election. It follows a February $2.7B defamation suit by Smartmatic, another voting systems company.
Filed in Delaware Superior Court, Dominion's suit claims that Fox “endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion.”
Dominion, which is requesting a jury trial, alleges that broadcasts by Fox included reports that Dominion committed election fraud by rigging the 2020 presidential election, that it's software and algorithms manipulated vote counts in the election, and that it paid kickbacks to government officials who used its machines in the 2020 Presidential Election were lies.
A string of Fox on-air personalities—Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro—are mentioned in the case, as are Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani, who were both sued for defamation by Dominion in January.
The lawsuit claims that Fox knew the statements about Dominion were lies and that “the vote tallies from Dominion machines could easily be confirmed by independent audits and hand recounts of paper ballots, as has been done repeatedly since the election.”
It alleges that “as a result of Fox’s orchestrated defamatory campaign, Dominion’s employees, from its software engineers to its founder and Chief Executive Officer, have been repeatedly harassed. Some have even received death threats. And, of course, Dominion’s business has suffered enormous and irreparable economic harm.”
Fox stands by its coverage of the 2020 election, which it says represented "the highest tradition of American journalism.
It pledged to “vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”
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