In a furthering of the Dominion Voting Systems vs. Fox News case, Judge Eric M. Davis of the Delaware Superior Court imposed a sanction on Fox for potentially withholding evidence.
According to the lawyers working on behalf of Dominion, Fox's lawyers have been pokey when it comes to turning over evidence in a timely fashion for the ongoing defamation case.
A lawyer for Dominion on Tuesday alleged that Fox News withheld Rupert Murdoch's role at the network, claiming that he only held an officer role at the network's parent company, Fox Corp. The voting machine company argued that this limited its ability to obtain communications from the billionaire and Davis agreed that the network has a "credibility problem."
"Rupert Murdoch has been listed as executive chairman of FOX News in our SEC filings since 2019 and this filing was referenced by Dominion's own attorney during his deposition," a spokesperson for Fox said in a statement.
Word of the sanction broke on Wednesday via a report by The New York Times, in which Davis states that if Dominion is required to do additional depositions, "Fox will do everything they can to make the person available, and it will be at a cost to Fox."
As Salon previously reported in February, "legal experts say that Fox News is in serious trouble after Dominion Voting Systems' legal filing exposed how the conservative news channel's executives and hosts privately disparaged election fraud claims from former President Donald Trump while promoting the content on air."
"This is a pretty staggering brief. Dominion's filing here is unique not just as to the volume of the evidence but also as to the directness of the evidence and the timeline of the evidence," says RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor and media law scholar at the University of Utah regarding the case.
The trial for this case is scheduled to start on Monday, with Rupert Murdoch expected to testify. According to additional reporting from Bloomberg, Murdoch's son, Lachlan, Fox Corp.'s CEO, Fox News hosts Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson are also expected to take the stand.
With the trial just days away, Dominion lawyer Davida Brook expresses concern over new "relevant documents from Fox" still coming in.
"We keep on learning about more relevant information from individuals other than Fox," Brook said in a quote obtained from The New York Times. "And to be honest we don't really know what to do about that, but that is the situation we find ourselves in."
