According to a new filing, Newsmax agreed to pay Smartmatic $40 million as part of a settlement in a defamation lawsuit related to the 2020 election.

The media outlet disclosed the settlement amount in a March 7th filing.

“The settlement, reached in September, included a cash payment and an option to purchase stock in Newsmax,” NBC News stated.

Newsmax has paid $20 million of the settlement so far.

Per NBC News:

“Management believes the settlement with Smartmatic will, subject to the payment of all consideration in a timely manner, eliminate future legal expenses the Company would have expected to bear related to this suit, which could have included costly appellate legal actions and other matters,” Newsmax wrote.

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Details of the payments provide insight into the confidential settlement agreement that were not publicly available last year. The 2021 lawsuit centered on Newsmax’s false claims that Smartmatic’s machines manipulated the 2020 presidential election in favor of Joe Biden. A deal was reached shortly before the case was set to go to trial.

After the settlement last year, Newsmax said in a Nov. 30 statement that it “acknowledges that the Court found that ‘allegations regarding whether the [2020 U.S. presidential election] and its results were somehow altered or manipulated by Smartmatic are factually false/untrue.’”

When reached for comment Thursday, Newsmax said it was not commenting on the settlement beyond its November statement.

From Reuters:

Smartmatic did not publicly estimate the damages at stake, but Newsmax has told the court the voting machine company was seeking $400 million to $600 million.

Smartmatic has sued Fox News in New York for $2.7 billion over the conservative network’s 2020 election coverage, the case referred to in Smartmatic’s statement on Thursday.

Fox last year agreed to settle defamation claims by Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million, which legal experts said was the biggest defamation settlement by a U.S. media company in history.

Read the filing HERE.

 

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