Voting technology firm Smartmatic is suing Fox News for defamation over its 2020 election coverage, claiming corporate executives like Rupert Murdoch intentionally destroyed evidence in the case.
Smartmatic claims that the network knowingly promoted false claims about the firm's role in the 2020 election and that, under Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch's leadership, it amplified conspiracy theories.
“Everyone from the Murdochs to the show producers knew they were pushing baseless claims,” Smartmatic External Legal Counsel and Managing Chair of the Litigation Group at Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff LLP, Erik Connolly said.
“So, Fox is piling new lies on top of its old ones to try to persuade shareholders that its financial exposure is less than the $780 million paid to Dominion. It is not. It is much more.”
In the filings, Smartmatic said that Rupert Murdoch and his son were among the FOC officials who “deleted their texts” deliberately.
This comes as a lower court decision was reversed, ruling that Fox News could obtain disputed materials about a separate federal bribery indictment against senior Smartmatic executives.
A Fox spokesperson said the newest allegations were to distract from the latest ruling decided in the network’s favour.
“Smartmatic weakly attempts to resurrect stale, baseless discovery issues that actually were disclosed by Fox and resolved two years ago,” the Fox spokesperson said.
“These issues have no bearing on the merits of Smartmatic’s case, which has fallen apart at every turn.”
Smartmatic believes the deleted texts were from November and December 2020.
“Fox has eliminated contemporaneous texts that would have revealed further evidence of what Fox executives knew about the falsity of their broadcasts,” Smartmatic lawyers wrote in the filing.
“While it championed election fraud on air, behind the scenes, Fox ensured that many of its executives’ incriminating communications would never see daylight.”
