A lawyer for Dominion said Fox agreed to pay the company $787.5 million. “The truth has meaning,” said the lawyer, Justin Nelson. “Lies have consequences.” The agreement, he added, “represents a ringing endorsement for truth and democracy.”
Fox did not immediately confirm the amount, and Fox lawyers did not speak to journalists assembled at the courthouse in Wilmington. But the company issued a statement, saying: “We are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects FOX’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”
The surprise end to the trial came after the court took a lunch break ahead of scheduled opening statements in the case. After a delay of more than two hours, the parties returned to the courtroom, and the judge announced they had reached a deal.
“The parties have resolved their case,” Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis announced before dismissing 12 jurors selected only hours earlier.
The settlement ends a humiliating chapter for Fox News: Through pretrial discovery, Dominion showed that Fox’s executives and producers were aware that President Donald Trump’s claims of election sabotage were bogus, but permitted hosts and guests to perpetrate them to keep viewers from switching to other channels.
Shows on the network repeated baseless assertions that Dominion, a Denver-based provider of election hardware and software, had fraudulently changed votes to help Joe Biden defeat Trump.
Fox and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, probably calculated that settling with Dominion would be far less expensive than risking an adverse jury verdict, which could have exceed Dominion’s own damage claim.
Murdoch and his legal advisers also appeared to think that their legal defense had eroded after Davis issued several pretrial rulings in March that significantly narrowed Fox’s avenues for defending its conduct.
The judge ruled, for instance, that the network could not dispute that it aired false, harmful statements about Dominion, though it could contest whether it did so with “actual malice” — that is, with knowledge that the statements were false or without regard to their truth or falsity. Plaintiffs must establish that a defendant acted with actual malice to prove a libel or defamation claim under a nearly 60-year-old standard established by the Supreme Court.
Fox also faced a potentially problematic jury pool. Since the trial was in Delaware, where Dominion is incorporated, jurors were drawn from the state’s electorate, which voted overwhelmingly in the 2020 presidential election for Biden, who had served for decades as a senator from Delaware and is one of the state’s most popular politicians.
The abrupt conclusion to the litigation spares Fox and Murdoch from further embarrassing revelations in open court about their conduct. The trial attracted worldwide media attention, as journalists and producers swarmed the downtown Wilmington courtroom.
Before the trial began, Davis indicated that Murdoch could be compelled to testify. The settlement relieves the 92-year-old mogul from having to recount his actions, including his lack of intervention as the network he co-founded repeatedly propagated falsehoods. It similarly spares a parade of famous Fox faces — among them Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Bret Baier — from having to take the witness stand.
Murdoch said in a deposition that Fox itself did not explicitly endorse Trump’s claims of fraud. But he said Lou Dobbs, Bartiromo, Pirro and Hannity had, to some degree.
The “stolen election” narrative perpetuated by Trump and amplified by Fox eventually culminated in a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress met to certify the electoral college results, though the judge had ruled that Dominion could not tell a jury that Fox’s broadcasts influenced the events of that day.
For Dominion, the settlement averts what probably would have been a lengthy legal fight even if it had won at trial. Fox’s legal advisers said they believed the network could have prevailed on appeal — a process that would probably have taken years and delayed any financial redress.
