Trump-allied lawyer Sidney Powell in 2020 sent Fox News an email filled with strange claims from a woman who claimed to be a decapitated time traveler as evidence of her claims that voting machines "flipped" votes from former President Donald Trump, according to a recent court filing from Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation case against the network.
Powell forwarded the email — with the subject line "Election Fraud Info" — to Fox host Maria Bartiromo in November 2020, telling her that she had received "evidence" of voter fraud, Dominion's filing states. The lawyer then appeared on Bartiromo's Fox Business show, "Sunday Morning Futures" on November 8, 2020 to push baseless allegations against the voting machine company.
The writer of the email is unknown but the source claimed that Dominion caused election irregularities and claimed she was "internally decapitated." She also claimed to have gotten her information from dreams and "the wind."
"Who am I? And how do I know all of this?" the email read. "I've had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl....I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live....The Wind tells me I'm a ghost, but I don't believe it."
Dominion's 192-page summary judgment motion vs Fox is just amazing.
— Alan Feuer (@alanfeuer) February 17, 2023
Here, it says, is the email from the "source" who first put Sidney Powell on to the Dominion conspiracy theory.
"The Wind tells me I'm a ghost," Powell's source wrote, "but I don't believe it." pic.twitter.com/8xqMukXgCz
She later described herself as being able to "time-travel in a semi-conscious state."
In another part of her email, the sender claimed that late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia "was purposefully killed at the annual Bohemian Grove camp… during a weeklong human hunting expedition," and that former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who died in 2017, and Murdoch "secretly huddle most days to determine how best to portray Mr. Trump as badly as possible."
Dominion included the messages in a court filing to support its allegation that Fox News and its executives knew the election fraud claims were false but allowed their hosts to spread misinformation anyway. The company is seeking $1.6 billion from Fox in damages.
In her deposition in the case, Bartiromo said she knew of the email, and claimed it was "nonsense," according to Dominion's filing.
Bartiromo never disclosed the origins of Powell's claims nor the existence of the email to her viewers, the filing said.
Powell baselessly claimed that there was "a massive and coordinated effort" to "steal" the 2020 election, but did not mention any sources as supporting evidence. She then alleged that "computers" were used to "manufacture votes for Joe Biden."
"We need an audit of all the computer systems that played any role in this fraud whatsoever," Powell said on air. Bartiromo did not correct Powell, nor did she request any proof.
Dominion is now suing Powell, in addition to other Trump allies Rudy Giuliani, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, for defamation and seeking $1.3 billion in damages.
A spokesperson for Fox dismissed Dominion's filing, arguing that it "mischaracterized 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."
