Having emails and texts revealed in court — and thus available for prying public eyes — is a nightmare for any company. Fox News is living through that horror now after Dominion Voting Systems on Thursday filed a motion for summary judgment against the network, laying out dozens of internal communications that were sent during the months after the 2020 presidential election.
The filing in Delaware court is part of Dominion's $1.6 billion defamation case that accuses Rupert Murdoch's network of knowingly promoting former President Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud, which included a disproved theory that the company manipulated votes to make President Joe Biden the winner.
Fox News has maintained that its coverage of Trump's claims were newsworthy, despite being false, and therefore protected under the First Amendment. In a statement, the network criticized Dominion's brief — which is based on depositions and discovery for the case — saying the company "mis-characterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law." The network is filing its motion in response to Dominion's allegations on Feb. 27.
