A judge in New York has ruled that the Fox Corporation, Fox News’s parent company, must face the $2.7 billion defamation suit brought by voting company Smartmatic.
In addition, the judge on Wednesday denied a motion to dismiss defamation claims against the corporation, NBC News reported Thursday.
However, the outlet said, “Smartmatic must also face Fox’s counterclaims that the substantial defamation claims are intended to suppress [sic] free speech, the judge ruled in a separate order.”
The orders pertain to the court battle between Smartmatic, which was accused of rigging the 2020 election, and the Fox News Corporation, which claims it covered news and people regarding that election, the NBC report continued:
Fox lawyers had asked the court to dismiss the claims against Fox Corp., arguing that the parent company — led at the time by executives Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch — was not legally responsible for Fox News coverage.
New York County Supreme Court Justice David Cohen disagreed and denied the motion in a Wednesday ruling, writing that “plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged in their amended complaint that Corp. employees played an affirmative role in the publication of the defamation at issue.”
In April, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems a $787 million settlement, a move that avoided going to trial in the defamation case the voting company brought against Fox, Breitbart News reported at the time.
In 2021, Dominion levied a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News and its leading corporation for defamation.
In the suit, Dominion accused the outlet of “harming its reputation by airing former President Donald Trump and his attorneys’ claims that Dominion’s voting machines were used to rig the 2020 election,” the Breitbart News report said.
Fox Corporation announced in August that its chief legal officer, who oversaw the settlement with Dominion, was stepping down, according to the Associated Press. However, Viet Dinh would retain the role of “special advisor” to the corporation.
When speaking of the 2020 election during a CNN town hall in May, Trump said, “That was a rigged election, and it’s a shame we had to go through it. It’s bad for our country. All over the world, they looked at it, and they saw exactly what everyone else saw.”
