Update to Dominion Voting Systems Second Company To Sue Fox For The Big Lie: “The AP reports Dominion Voting sues Fox for $1.6B over 2020 election claims. Now they need to sue One America News Network (OANN), Newsmax, Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia), etc. to get discovery. Roll up every traitor in this seditious plot.”
Ask and you shall receive: Law and Crime reports today that Dominion Sues Right-Wing Networks OAN and Newsmax Over ‘Race to the Bottom’ Election Fraud Conspiracy Theories:
Dominion Voting Systems on Tuesday filed a pair of billion-dollar defamation lawsuits against One America News (OAN) and Newsmax, alleging that the far-right media outlets falsely accused the company of rigging the 2020 presidential election.
The filings, which each seek more than $1.6 billion in damages apiece, are the latest in an avalanche of lawsuits aimed at conservative media organizations and figures who allegedly spread conspiracy theories about Dominion machines switching votes away from Donald Trump.
“During and after the November 2020 election, Newsmax saw a business opportunity. Spurred by a quest for profits and viewers, Newsmax—a competitor to media giant Fox—engaged in a race to the bottom with Fox and other outlets such as One America News Network (OAN) to spread false and manufactured stories about election fraud. Dominion quickly became the focus of this downward spiral of lies, as each broadcaster attempted to outdo the others by making the lies more outrageous, spreading them further, and endorsing them as strongly as possible,” the lawsuit against Newsmax states.
A nearly identical passage also appears in the OAN complaint. Dominion already filed a defamation suit against Fox News in March.
The suits claim that in the months following the election, both Newsmax and OAN “manufactured, endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion.” Those alleged lies include claims that Dominion committed election fraud; its algorithms manipulated vote tallies; the company was founded in Venezuela “to rig elections for the dictator Hugo Chavez,” and Dominion contributed to voting irregularities in states where its machines weren’t used.
According to Dominion, both networks also promoted and broadcasted interviews with “discredited figures” such as Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, all of whom Dominion has sued in their individual capacity.
Both suits also assert that the conservative networks’ broadcasts have adversely affected the country, repeatedly invoking the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
[T]he suit against Newsmax was filed in Delaware Superior Court. The suit against OAN was filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. and also names owners Robert Herring and Charles Herring as well as OAN anchors Chanel Rion and Christina Bobb as defendants.
“To capitalize on the interest its target audience had in the false Dominion narrative, OAN effectively deputized its Chief White House Correspondent, Chanel Rion, as an in-house spokesperson for all Dominion-related content,” the suit states. “After priming its viewers with a steady diet of post-election programming falsely claiming Dominion rigged the 2020 election, OAN and Rion began producing an entire line of programming exclusively devoted to defaming Dominion, descriptively named ‘Dominion-izing the Vote,’ which branded OAN’s disinformation and defamation campaign against Dominion into a single catchy phrase that is now synonymous with fraudulently flipping votes.”
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Dominion CEO John Poulos released a statement saying the company had to take action against the networks.
“The defendants in today’s filings recklessly disregarded the truth when they spread lies in November and continue to do so today,” Poulos said. “We are filing these three cases today because the defendants named show no remorse, nor any sign they intend to stop spreading disinformation. This barrage of lies by the Defendants and others have caused—and continue to cause—severe damage to our company, customers, and employees. We have no choice but to seek to hold those responsible to account.”
Daniel Politi at Slate adds, Dominion Sues Newsmax, One America News Network Over Election Fraud Lies:
Dominion Voting Systems has filed three $1.6 billion defamation lawsuits against two far-right media networks and a prominent ally of former President Donald Trump claiming they spread false information about fraud in the 2020 presidential election. The voting machine company filed lawsuits against One America News Network and Newsmax Media as well as businessman Patrick Byrne, the former head of Overstock.com. This is the latest in a series of lawsuits by Dominion, which has also sued Fox News, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, and lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani under similar allegations.
Patrick Byrne is the man behind the Big Lie propaganda book and documentary “The Deep Rig” about the Arizona Senate’s GQP sham “fraudit,” starring Doug Logan aka Cyber Ninjas. The conspiracy theory film made at the Arizona audit.
The far-right networks spread lots of lies about fraud in the presidential election and “helped create and cultivate an alternate reality where up is down, pigs have wings, and Dominion engaged in a colossal fraud to steal the presidency from Donald Trump by rigging the vote,” Dominion wrote in its lawsuits. Dominion says that OANN and Newsmax “manufactured, endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion.” As a result of the lies the networks spread, the company claims it lost out on contracts and its employees faced harassment as well as death threats.
“The defendants in today’s filings recklessly disregarded the truth when they spread lies in November and continue to do so today,” Dominion CEO John Poulos said in a statement. “We are filing these three cases today because the defendants named show no remorse, nor any sign they intend to stop spreading disinformation.”
The Arizona Senate, its agent Doug Logan aka Cyber Ninjas, and Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward, are all likely on Dominion’s list of Big Lie defamers to be sued.
Better start writing checks with lots of zeroes in them. “Judge rules Dominion case can proceed against Trump allies”, https://apnews.com/article/business-election-2020-fdb8faaacdbc06b241e55ebb37fbff61
A federal judge cleared the way Wednesday for a defamation case by Dominion Voting Systems to proceed against Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell, allies of former President Donald Trump who had all falsely accused the company of rigging the 2020 presidential election.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols ruled that there was no blanket protection on political speech and denied an argument from two of the defendants that the federal court in Washington wasn’t the proper venue for the case.
“As an initial matter, there is no blanket immunity for statements that are ‘political’ in nature,” the judge wrote in the 44-page ruling.
While courts have recognized there are some hyperbolic statements in political discourse, “it is simply not the law that provably false statements cannot be actionable if made in the context of an election,” Nichols wrote.
The judge also rejected Powell and Lindell’s arguments that Dominion had failed to meet a legal burden that their statements were made with “actual malice.”
He outlined several instances where the trio made outlandish and blatantly false claims, including when Powell stated that the company was created in Venezuela to rig elections for the late leader Hugo Chavez and that it can switch votes.
In allowing the lawsuit to go forward, Nichols said Dominion had adequately proved that Powell made statements that could lead to a lawsuit “because a reasonable juror could conclude that they were either statements of fact or statements of opinion that implied or relied upon facts that are provably false.” Dominion has sought $1.3 billion in damages from the trio.
The judge used similar language against Lindell, the founder and CEO of MyPillow, saying Dominion proved Lindell had “made his claims knowing that they were false or with reckless disregard for the truth.”
[T]he judge’s ruling came just a day after the vote-counting machine maker filed defamation lawsuits against right-wing broadcasters Newsmax Media Inc. and One America News Network, as well as Patrick Byrne, a prominent Trump ally and former chief executive of Overstock.com.
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Watch these assholes file for bankruptcy protection now.
Glad someone’s got the money and the moxy to go after them!