After two years of litigation and moments before court proceedings were set to begin, Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News reached a settlement for $787.5 million, roughly half of what Dominion had asked for in damages.
The settlement, reported by The Washington Post, came after court proceedings were delayed Tuesday. In the afternoon, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis said the case was “resolved,” indicating a settlement was reached between Dominion and the media giant.
Dominion had sued Fox News for $1.6 billion for allegedly reporting false information about the company’s voting machines in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The trial was set to begin Monday, but Davis delayed court proceedings to encourage the two parties to reach a settlement out of court, as the Deseret News reported.
According to CNN, Fox had argued that the stories around the 2020 presidential election were newsworthy and that the lawsuit was an attack on press freedoms and First Amendment rights.
But on March 31, Davis sided with Dominion when he ruled that claims promoted by Fox about the voting machines were false. Still, Dominion would have needed to convince the jury that the news network and its parent company, Fox Corp., acted with actual malice in order to prove defamation, according to NBC News.
After the settlement was announced, Fox Corp. released a statement, saying the media company was “pleased” to have reached a resolution.
“We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards,” the statement said, according to The New York Times. “We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”
Meanwhile, outside the courthouse, Dominion CEO John Poulos said, “Fox has admitted to telling lies about Dominion that caused enormous damage to my company, our employees and the customers that we serve,” per The Washington Post.
Now, neither Fox Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch, nor other Fox hosts like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo will have to testify in court.
If the case had gone to trial, Dominion would have had to prove there was actual malice and that Fox knowingly aired false information.
Proving malice is difficult and this precedent, set by a Supreme Court decision in 1964, “protects speakers regardless of politics,” as Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor, wrote for The New York Times.
While winning a defamation suit can be tough, Dominion had a long list of emails, texts and other communication between Fox News hosts and management, making its case stronger.
“It isn’t enough to show that Fox made a conscious decision to amplify election denialism generally in its coverage,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a former newspaper reporter who is now a First Amendment expert at the University of Utah, per Politico.
“Dominion has to show that the people who were responsible for creating (or platforming) the false statements about Dominion had knowledge that those statements were false. It’s about connecting the dots,” he said.
Fox faces another $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit brought by Smartmatic, a voting software company that accused Fox of spreading false information about its products in the aftermath of the 2020 election, per the Los Angeles Times.