Dominion Voting Systems announced a lawsuit against Fox News on Friday after it alleged that the media outlet amplified election fraud claims following former President Donald Trump’s defeat.
The company is seeking over $1.6 billion in damages, saying that Fox News “sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process,” according to the complaint. The news outlet called the action “baseless.”
“As alleged in the complaint, despite claiming to be a news network, Fox actively propagated disinformation to purposely mislead viewers,” said Dominion legal counsel Tom Clare, partner at Clare Locke, in a statement. “It knowingly spread lies about Dominion Voting Systems repeatedly for months, all the while deliberately ignoring Dominion’s specific and repeated warnings that these smears were not true.”
Dominion officials tried to contact executives at the cable news giant, but they were ignored, the lawsuit claimed.
“This was a conscious, knowing business decision to endorse and repeat and broadcast these lies in order to keep its viewership,” said another of the company’s lawyers, Justin Nelson of Susman Godfrey.
Fox News said it is “proud” of the election coverage it provided.
“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,” a spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
Dominion has not filed litigation against specific personalities at Fox News, but attorneys for the company have not yet ruled out the possibility.
“The buck stops with Fox on this,” said attorney Stephen Shackelford, another lawyer for the voting software business. “Fox chose to put this on all of its many platforms. They rebroadcast, republished it on social media and other places.”
SMARTMATIC FILES $2.7B LAWSUIT AGAINST FOX NEWS GIULIANI, AND POWELL OVER ELECTION FRAUD CLAIMS
Fox News’s Lou Dobbs aired a segment to debunk voter fraud claims after he was issued a legal notice from Smartmatic, another voting company. The corporation was infested with “left-wing radicals,” Dobbs previously said.
“There are lots of opinions about the integrity of the election, the irregularities of mail-in voting, of election voting machines and voting software,” Dobbs told his viewers before he brought on Edward Perez, an expert with Open Source Election Technology Institute, a nonprofit organization, to give “his assessment of Smartmatic and recent claims about the company.”
Smartmatic announced a $2.7 billion lawsuit against the news giant, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell on Feb. 4, claiming that the trio “invented” facts about the outcome of the November 2020 election. Fox News has since filed four motions to dismiss the suit.
“In their story, Smartmatic was a Venezuelan company under the control of corrupt dictators from socialist countries,” the company wrote about the three defendants. “In their story, Smartmatic’s election technology and software were used in many of the states with close outcomes. And, in their story, Smartmatic was responsible for stealing the 2020 election by switching and altering votes to rig the election for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Dominion, starting Jan. 8, has filed lawsuits against Powell, Giuliani, and Mike Lindell, all of whom have been at the forefront of election fraud claims.
“After hitting the jackpot with Donald Trump’s endorsement for MyPillow and after a million-dollar bet on Fox News ads had paid out handsome returns, Michael Lindell exploited another chance to boost sales: marketing MyPillow to people who would tune in and attend rallies to hear Lindell tell the ‘Big Lie’ that Dominion had stolen the 2020 election,” stated a lawsuit against Lindell filed on Feb. 22.
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The suit continued: “Through discovery, Dominion will prove that there is no real evidence supporting the Big Lie. Dominion brings this action to vindicate the company’s rights, to recover damages, to seek a narrowly tailored injunction, to stand up for itself and its employees, and to stop Lindell and MyPillow from further profiting at Dominion’s expense.”
