Court papers in a voting technology company’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News point to Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro as leaders in spreading false stories about election fraud in the weeks after Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump in 2020.
Arguments for summary judgment by Smartmatic were filed in lightly redacted form this week at the New York Supreme Court. It’s like a bad rerun for Fox: Similar revelations about its conduct following the 2020 election came in a lawsuit by another company falsely accused of doctoring votes, Dominion Voting Systems. Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787 million in a 2023 settlement after the judge found it was “CRYSTAL CLEAR” that none of the claims against the voting system company were true.
In short: Fox let Trump aides spread conspiracy theories despite knowing they were false because it was what their viewers wanted to hear. Fox was trying to hold on to viewers who were angry at the network for saying Biden had won the election.
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