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The judge overseeing the $1.6 billion lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News Corp. has issued a key ruling in the case. According to Axios, the Delaware judge ruled that Dominion “can force Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan to take the witness stand in court at a defamation trial later this month.”
“The ruling deals a major blow to Fox News, which had been trying to persuade the judge not to compel the elder Murdoch, who serves as chair of Fox News parent Fox Corp., to testify in person,” the outlet’s report continued.
Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis has stated that he would not prevent Dominion from subpoenaing the Murdochs to testify in person later this month, as he considers them “relevant” to the case, noted Axios.
In February, Rupert Murdoch testified in a closed-door session, a transcript of which was subsequently released. Axios claimed the testimony did not go well for Fox News:
Asked during the proceeding whether it was fair to say that he “seriously doubted any claim of massive election fraud,” Murdoch said, “Oh, yes,” and conceded that he doubted false narratives around election fraud from the beginning.
To win the suit, Dominion will need to prove that Fox News acted to peddle false information knowingly. Fox, meanwhile, has argued that the company is protected under the First Amendment and has a protected right to pursue stories and cover the news.
“Because of the First Amendment, which has strong protections for the news media, there’s a very high bar in being able to prove that Fox acted with ‘actual malice,'” Axios noted.
A spokesperson for Fox News noted to the outlet: “Dominion clearly wants to continue generating misleading stories from their friends in the media to distract from their weak case. Demanding witnesses who had nothing to do with the challenged broadcasts is just the latest example of their political crusade in search of a financial windfall.”
During his February testimony, Rupert Murdoch also said that his network hosts were “trying to straddle the line between spewing conspiracy theories on one hand, yet calling out the fact that they are actually false on the other.”
“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight,” Murdoch also testified.
At the time, the network said in a statement that Dominion’s lawsuit “has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny.”
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that it would not hear a case that alleged Dominion Voting Systems and Facebook had an undue influence on the 2020 elections. The court did not make any comment about why justices rejected the appeal from eight Americans led by Kevin O’Rourke after they had lost two previous times in court, Law & Crime reported.
The main plaintiff in the case, Kevin O’Rourke, attempted to represent a group of eight individuals from five different states, including seven who voted in the 2020 election. However, his efforts were unsuccessful. One of the individuals, Neil Yarbrough, is described as a “disgruntled voter” who did not cast a ballot.
The lawsuit is based on a theory alleging that Dominion’s voting software allowed for the manipulation of “hundreds of thousands of votes” in the 2020 election due to widespread vulnerabilities. The suit also alleges that Dominion’s voting systems were intentionally designed to “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
“To ‘fortify’ the election, Respondent, Facebook, Inc., k/n/a, Meta Platforms, Inc. (Facebook) regulated information that a cadre of progressives thought was misleading to the public,” the plaintiffs said. “Additionally, Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) sought to control the process of local elections across the county under the cover of COVID-19 relief through conditioned grants totaling hundreds of millions of dollars provided by the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Facebook, Respondent, Mark Zuckerberg (Zuckerberg), and his wife, Respondent, Priscila Chan (Chan).”
“Extraordinary lengths were taken to ensure the incumbent’s defeat,” they said.
The suit also alleged that Dominion “has played in the creation and perpetuation of concerns regarding ‘vulnerabilities and a lack of transparency in the election technology industry.’”
Lower courts, however, rejected the arguments, claiming that plaintiffs “have not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest or injury sufficient to grant them standing to sue. With Plaintiffs not having standing to sue, there is no case or controversy, a necessary predicate for federal court jurisdiction under Article III.”
