Fox Corporation will pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5m (£630m) to settle a landmark libel suit brought by the election technology company.
Dominion had been seeking $1.6bn over claims repeatedly aired on Fox News suggesting its voting machines were involved in a conspiracy to rig the 2020 US presidential election.
Rumours a settlement was imminent have abounded since Sunday, when the defamation trial’s Monday start date was suddenly pushed back one day. A 12-person jury was successfully selected on Tuesday, but reportedly failed to return from lunch. The FT reports that “after a lengthy wait” Judge Eric Davis appeared and told members of the press gathered in the courtroom that the parties had reached a settlement.
In a statement, Fox said: “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false” and that the settlement “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards”.
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Justin Nelson, Dominion’s lead counsel, said outside the courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware that the payment “was a strong message of accountability, along with a statement acknowledging the court’s order that these were false [claims] – and this has all along been about those goals for us”.
Had it gone to trial the case may have seen Fox proprietor Rupert Murdoch called to testify, as well as high-profile Fox names such as host Tucker Carlson. Internal Fox communications obtained during the discovery process and published by the Dominion team already shed rare light on the inner workings at the influential, controversial news network.
Under US law, to win a libel suit against a news publisher a plaintiff would have to demonstrate not only that an outlet spread false information but that it had acted with “actual malice” in doing so.
Despite that high bar, some commentators suggested Dominion had a better than usual chance of winning its defamation case. Judge Davis had already ruled last month that 20 statements made about Dominion on Fox News in 2020 were false.
The settlement, worth approximately half of what Dominion was suing for, is believed to be the largest libel settlement in history. The only case that has been more costly is phone-hacking, which has cost News Corp more than £1bn in total over the past decade.
[Read more: Why a lack of ‘actual malice’ scuppered Sarah Palin’s New York Times libel suit]
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