People walk by the News Corporation headquarters, home to Fox News, on April 18, 2023 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
Fox Corp. and its TV networks agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit this week, but the media giant’s legal headaches don’t end there.
Still hanging in the balance is voting software company Smartmatic USA’s defamation case, which is seeking $2.7 billion in damages – over $1 billion more than Dominion initially sought in its lawsuit.
Smartmatic, like Dominion, filed its defamation lawsuit against Fox for spreading false claims that its voting software helped rig the 2020 election that saw Joe Biden triumph over Donald Trump. Smartmatic’s suit also specifically names host Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and former host Lou Dobbs.
Smartmatic’s lawusit alleges that Fox and its hosts didn’t just report the statements being made by Trump and his allies at the time, but that the network, Dobbs, Pirro and Bartiromo “effectively endorsed and participated in the statements with reckless disregard for, or serious doubts about,” whether the claims being made on air were true at all.
Dobbs’ weekday program on the Fox Business network was canceled shortly after he was named as a defendant in Smartmatic’s lawsuit. Fox has said the show’s cancellation was in the works prior to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit says the network and its hosts in the weeks following the election “purposely avoided publicly available knowledge” that would have disproved Smartmatic’s software and Dominion’s machines were used to switch votes.
Although Smartmatic’s lawsuit was filed shortly ahead of Dominion’s in 2021, the pace of the case has lagged in comparison. It remains unclear how or whether the settlement between Fox and Dominion will affect Smartmatic’s case.
“Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign,” Smartmatic’s attorney Erik Connolley said in a statement Tuesday after…
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