In a trial that begins on Monday, Dominion Voting Systems will seek to hold Fox News liable for airing statements that falsely implicated the company in a massive fraud that supposedly delivered a phony victory to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. That task will be easier thanks to pretrial rulings that recognized the falsity of those statements and rejected three Fox defenses.
"The question of falsity is whether the content of the allegations was true, not whether Fox truthfully republished the allegations," Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis said when he rejected Fox's motion for summary judgment on March 31. "Through its extensive proof, Dominion has met its burden of showing there is no genuine issue of material fact as to falsity….The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that [it] is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true."
As Davis noted, Fox guests and hosts falsely claimed that "Dominion committed election fraud"; that it "manipulated vote counts through its software and algorithms"; that it was "founded in Venezuela to rig elections for dictator Hugo Chavez"; and that it "paid kickbacks to government officials who used [its] machines in the Election." Those statements are "defamatory per se," Davis ruled, because they "strike at the basic integrity of [Dominion's] business" and "seem to charge Dominion with the serious crime of election fraud."
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