Fox Corp, the parent of Fox News Network, filed a motion in New York state court Wednesday that would end Smartmatic’s defamation suit against the company on the grounds that it was already functionally worthless by the time on-air Fox News talent disparaged it.
The Fox Corp motion for summary judgment starkly contrasts Smartmatic with its competitor, Dominion, which secured a $787.5 million settlement from Fox in 2023.
“Unlike Dominion, Smartmatic was a failing business without a significant presence in the United States entering the 2020 Presidential Election,” Fox’s motion reads. “Unlike Dominion, Smartmatic was founded by Venezuelans and was embroiled in claims of fraud in Venezuelan and Filipino elections well before any controversy arose over the 2020 Presidential Election. Unlike Dominion, Smartmatic’s co-founder and other key leadership were under federal investigation (and are now facing trial) for bribery and money laundering.”
And then the kicker, “Smartmatic is so unlike Dominion that Dominion itself argued that statements merely associating Dominion with Smartmatic were defamatory per se.”
I guess Smartmatic won’t be calling any Dominion officials to the stand.
Under New York law, not only must a plaintiff show that a defendant’s statements were false, but they must also prove that they were directly economically harmed by those statements. Fox is essentially arguing that Smartmatic was worthless at the time the comments were made, so no economic damage could possibly have occurred.
“While Smartmatic claims scores of lost contract opportunities, there is no evidence that Fox News’s coverage caused a single former, existing, or potential customer to refuse to do business with Smartmatic,” Fox’s motion argues, noting that Smartmatic had no major United States contracts in 2020 and had no prospects of landing any new ones.
“Smartmatic’s lost-profit case thus rests entirely on the implausible theory that electoral officials in places like Turkey, Iraq, and the Congo were tuned into U.S.-based Fox News and Fox Business coverage and decided not to award contracts to Smartmatic because of what they heard in passing on a segment of a nighttime Fox Business show,” Fox argues.
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Fox did not agree to settle with Dominion until the eve of the scheduled trial was set to take place in Delaware. Smartmatic has not gone to trial yet, and after Wednesday’s motion they will have to convince New York judges that their $2.7 billion in alleged damages are not purely speculative.
Considering the company’s lack of profits in the United States before the 2020 election, they sure do seem pretty fictional.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
