Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch is expected to be impeached Monday as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News for reinforcing false claims that Dominion Voting Systems rigged machines were responsible for the defeat from Donald J. Trump in 2020 .
Mr. Murdoch will be the highest-ranking corporate figure within the Fox media empire to date to answer questions under oath in the matter. And his appearance before Dominion’s lawyers is a sign of how unexpectedly far and quickly the lawsuit has progressed in recent weeks – and how contentious it has become.
Fox and Dominion have been going back and forth in Delaware state court since the summer in an escalating dispute over witnesses, evidence and testimony. The arguments point to the high stakes of the case, which will pass judgment on whether the most powerful conservative media outlet in the country deliberately misled its audience and helped sow one of the most pervasive falsehoods in American history. politics.
While the law tends to favor the media in defamation cases, Dominion has an unusually strong case according to independent observers. Day after day, Fox hosts and guests repeat untrue stories about Dominion’s ties to communist regimes and far-fetched theories about how the software allowed enemies of the former president to steal his votes.
“This is a very different kind of case,” said David A. Logan, dean of the Roger Williams School of Law, who has advocated for some libel laws to be relaxed. “Rarely do cases show a weeks-long pattern of inflammatory, demonstrably false, but also strangely inconsistent statements.”
Dominion, in his quest to obtain the private communications of as many low-, mid-, and high-level Fox personnel as possible, hopes to prove that people within the network knew they were spreading lies. Fox hopes to cast doubt on that by showing how his hosts pressured Trump allies for evidence they never provided and that Dominion machines were vulnerable to hacking even when they weren’t hacked.
The judge, Eric M. Davis, has ruled in favor of Dominion in most cases, allowing the voting company to expand the pool of potential evidence it can present to a jury with text messages from Fox employees’ personal phones and the employment contracts of star hosts like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, along with those of Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and her top executives.
Dominion has made dozens of statements with current and former network personalities, producers, company executives and executives. The people surveyed range from the ranks of middle management at Fox News headquarters in Manhattan to the corner office in Century City, Los Angeles, where Mr. Murdoch oversees the Fox Corporation and its sprawling business of conservative media outlets.
The battle for statements has intensified in recent weeks as lawyers for the two companies squabbled over whether Mr. Hannity and another pro-Trump host, Jeanine Pirro, were supposed to sit for a second round of questioning about messages Dominion obtained from their phones as part of the discovery process. Fox lawyers have argued that the hosts should not be forced to testify again, citing the legal protection journalists have against being forced to divulge confidential sources.
The judge ruled that Dominion’s attorneys could re-examine both Mr. Hannity and Ms. Pirro, but limited the scope of what they could ask. Ms. Pirro’s second statement was late last month; mr. Hannity’s has yet to be scheduled.
Fox has accused Dominion in lawsuits of making “escalating demands” for documents that are voluminous, saying it would have to hire a second litigation team to meet such a “crushing burden.” (The judge largely disagrees.)
In a sign of simmering tensions between the two sides, Fox’s lawyers have asked the court to impose tens of thousands of dollars in sanctions against Dominion. Fox has accused the voting machine company’s CEO, John Poulos, and other senior company officials of failing to keep their emails and text messages because parties to a lawsuit must deal with potentially relevant evidence.
After Dominion filed its lawsuit in March 2021 — alleging that Fox’s coverage of its machines not only cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in business, but also “damaged the idea of credible elections” — many experts in the field of media law assumed this case would end like many other high-profile defamation lawsuit against a news organization: with a settlement.
Fox News has a history of settling sensitive lawsuits before they reach a jury. In recent years alone, it has paid tens of millions of dollars in claims: to women who reported sexual harassment at the hands of former CEO, Roger Ailes, and by prominent hosts, including Bill O’Reilly; as well as to the family of Seth Rich, a former Democratic Party staffer who was killed in a robbery that some conservatives tried to link to an anti-Clinton conspiracy theory.
But a settlement with Dominion seems a remote possibility at this point. Fox has said that the broad protection afforded to the media under the First Amendment shields it from liability. The network says it was merely reporting on Mr Trump’s allegations, which are protected speech even if the president is lying. The Dominion complaint outlines instances where Fox hosts did more than just report those false claims, they endorsed them.
“This doesn’t appear to be a case that will be resolved — but anything could happen,” said Dan K. Webb, a well-known trial attorney representing Fox in the dispute. “There are some very basic First Amendment issues here, and they haven’t changed.”
In a statement, Dominion said the company was confident its case would show Fox knew it was spreading lies “from the highest levels.”
“Instead of acting responsibly and showing remorse, Fox has instead doubled down,” the statement said. “We are focused on holding Fox accountable and are confident that the truth will prevail in the end.”
The judge has set a trial date for April next year. A separate libel suit against Fox by the voice company Smartmatic will not be ready for trial until the summer of 2024.
Part of the reason Fox executives and its lawyers believe they can prevail is the high level of evidence Dominion must reach to convince a jury that the network’s coverage of the 2020 election defamed her. Under the law, a jury must conclude that Fox acted with “genuine malice,” meaning that people within the network knew what they were reporting was false but did so anyway, or recklessly ignored information that showed what they were reporting was wrong .
That’s what Dominion hopes to show the jury with the private messages it obtained from Fox employees at all levels of the company several weeks after the election. Very little is publicly known about what those messages might contain.
In addition to arguing that coverage of Dominion was protected as free speech, Fox argues that it was merely statements made by newsmakers. “There is nothing more newsworthy than reporting on the President of the United States and his lawyers making allegations of voter fraud,” a spokeswoman said.
Fox’s lawyers are also planning lines of defense that they hope will erode Dominion’s credibility, even if it means relying on some of the conspiracy theories at the heart of Dominion’s case. For example, they may argue that it was plausible that the machines had been hacked, pointing to questions raised by at least one independent expert about the security of the software.
As part of their fact-finding process, Fox attorneys have obtained information from a University of Michigan computer scientist who wrote a report this year saying there were vulnerabilities in Dominion’s system that could be exploited, even though there is no evidence of a such infringement.
Mr Webb said the aim would be to show that the allegations of fraud “were not a whole lot”. But it was not his plan, he said, to pretend that Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about voter fraud — which were the same as many of the falsehoods made on-air at Fox — were true. “The president’s allegations were not correct,” Mr. Webb said. He added that he intended “to show the jury that those security concerns were there and were real and added plausibility to the president’s allegations.”
Following Mr Murdoch’s statement on Monday, lawyers on both sides of the case said they expected one more senior executive to be questioned by Dominion’s attorneys: Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the Fox Corporation, who has served Fox News for more than 25 years with Mr. Ailes. past.