Dominion Voting System filed a lawsuit against FOX News on Friday over election fraud claims.
Dominion’s $1.6 billion dollar defamation suit claims FOX News used the false election fraud claims to boost its ratings (Per CNBC):
Dominion argues that Fox News, which amplified inaccurate assertions that Dominion altered votes, “sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process,” according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by The Associated Press.
Some Fox News on-air reporting segments have debunked some of the claims targeting Dominion.
Dominion also claims they tried to “set the record straight” with Fox News, but the network largely ignored Dominion’s attempts to provide its version of events.
Trump’s former Attorney General has said that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
This is not Dominion Voting Systems’ first lawsuit surrounding the 2020 election fraud claims.
Dominion has filed individual lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani, My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, and Trump’s former attorney Sidney Powell for a staggering $1.3 billion each.
Powell is defending the lawsuit saying that “reasonable” people would not accept her statements about election fraud as “fact” because the legal process surrounding the fraud had not yet played out.
The current lawsuit against Lindell claims he defamed Dominion to “sell pillows” (The Hill):
“He is well aware of the independent audits and paper ballot recounts conclusively disproving the Big Lie,” reads the lawsuit. “But Lindell … sells the lie to this day because the lie sells pillows.”
…
“Instead of retracting his lies, Lindell—a multimillionaire with a nearly unlimited ability to broadcast his preferred messages on conservative media—whined that he was being ‘censored’ and ‘attacked’ and produced a ‘docu-movie’ featuring shady characters and fake documents sourced from dark corners of the internet,” the lawsuit continues.
Some legal experts have said that the lawsuits are credible, but that they are not slam dunk cases (CNBC):
While the sums are staggering, lawyers who have worked on defamation cases in the past say the companies have made a pretty good showing so far.
“I think these are cases asserting traditional libel claims, claims for defamation, applying pretty settled law in this country,” said David Schulz, a defamation scholar at Yale Law School. But, Schulz added, “It’s not like these are going to be slam-dunk cases at all.”
It’s too early to tell what’s going to happen in these cases, but it’s unlikely Dominion will end up with billions of dollars from the defendants if they should win.
