For over two years, FOX News and voting technology company Dominion have been engaged in a legal battle over alleged defamation claims that the media giant made regarding the company’s technology in the 2020 election.
Dominion has been at the center of a number of election fraud-related controversies and has been criticized by top conservative lawmakers and conservative media.
The trial, which was only in its beginning stages, resulted in multiple key admission from Dominion, including that the company warned election officials of ‘major security issues’ in the runup to the 2020 Presidential election.
On April 16, FOX News settled with Dominion for $787.5 million in relation to the defamation claims.
The amount is less than half of the $1.6 billion that Dominion initially sought in 2021 when they filed the lawsuit.
FOX News, for its part, contended that it did not make false allegations about Dominion and was simply repeating what politicians such as President Trump said about the voting technology company.
Dominion claimed that FOX’s broadcasts harmed the company’s reputation.
The agreement to end the case avoided what most experts suggested would have been a damaging, high-profile trial for the conservative channel in which owner Rupert Murdoch would have been compelled to testify in open court.
Dominion executives are now bragging about how Tucker Carlson was fired as a result of their settlement with Fox News.
Daily Mail reports that Dominion says they’re hoping all of the text messages between Fox News hosts, including Tucker Carlson, that they discovered as part of their defamation lawsuit will one day become public.
As part of the lawsuit discovery, Dominion’s lawyers uncovered texts in which Fox hosts and journalists seemed to acknowledge that the fraud claims were not true or farfetched but gave them airtime anyway.
In their first interview since the lawsuit was settled unexpectedly, Dominion’s CEO John Poulos and Stephen Shackelford, a lawyer who was involved in the case, told Axios they now want the full record to become unredacted.
“Dominion did not insist on them firing Tucker Carlson as part of the settlement. But the very fact that that’s what resulted out of all of this, and it’s traceable from the work that Dominion set in motion.. of course, I know what’s in the redacted stuff, and I can’t say anything about it. I hope that it all gets un-redacted at some point,” Shackelford, a partner at Susman Godfrey LLP, told Axios.