Exclusive: Dominion Voting Systems tells its Fox News lawsuit story (www.axios.com)

Fox News, one of America’s most powerful media companies, earlier this month agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, related to false statements made about Dominion on Fox’s air.

Oral history: What follows is an edited transcript of an exclusive interview with three of Dominion’s key players, including its CEO, private equity owner and outside attorney on the Fox case.  They discuss Dominion from founding to the 2020 election to now, including death threats, loss of customers and the post-settlement firing of Tucker Carlson.

Poulos: We had obviously heard a lot of talk about the absentee ballots. But really it was Nov. 8 when we got the first view of, “Wow, they are really unfairly targeting Dominion.”

Yaghoobzadeh: It was the Maria Bartiromo show when she had Sidney Powell on. I was in absolute shock.

I’m an immigrant to the country. I came here when I was five from Iran. My parents kind of just fled over a weekend, right around Iranian Revolution, because we were Jewish and fearful of persecution. They saw a revolution happen in that country and they decided to leave.

Stephen Shackelford, partner at Susman Godfrey LLP: We were involved in numerous different litigations after the election trying to fend off the false claims of fraud from people like Sidney Powell. So we were deep into all this and saw what was happening to Dominion.

Poulos: January 6th didn’t really impact [our decision to sue].

Poulos: It was immediate. I had customers calling in the middle of procurement saying, “Boy, there’s no way that I could buy from you.” We saw customers that had initiated their renewals prior to the defamation and were in the last stages of the formal approval. After the defamation, as soon as December 2020, they had their funding pulled by their boards.

Shackelford: There were a lot of smoking gun documents in the case. For instance, the Rupert Murdoch text about when he was watching the Nov. 19 press conference and saying that was terrible stuff. He knew the truth and yet his enormous asset, Fox News, kept broadcasting the lies. The Tucker Carlson texts where it took him no time at all to figure out that the software stuff was absurd.

Judge Eric Davis stunned the Delaware courtroom by announcing the two sides had reached a settlement. Soon, it was disclosed that Fox would pay Dominion $787.5 million, with Fox publicly acknowledging that the court had found it to have aired false statements. Fox did not make that acknowledgment on its air, nor did it apologize.

Dominion has pending defamation lawsuits against One America News, NewsMax, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne. None is expected to reach trial before 2024.

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3 Comments

  1. Quoting again from the article regarding future plans:

    “We expected [Fox] to fight tooth and nail and to pull out all the stops, and they did. The scariest part of what they did trying to rewrite First Amendment law just to save Fox’s hide in a way that was completely, in my view, disingenuous and dangerous.”

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