Fox News managed on Tuesday to secure a settlement with Dominion Voting Systems in the lawsuit against their promotion of election conspiracy theories, paying out $787 million to resolve the dispute and sparing themselves the spectacle of having their top personalities and executives admit on the stand they knew the network’s claims were false.
But Fox News is only the beginning, said Dominion’s lead counsel Justin Nelson to a CNN panel on Tuesday: they are going to go after several other people who promoted the same false claims and damaged their reputation.
“What this settlement today shows is that the actual malice standard isn’t just on paper … journalists can’t knowingly lie,” said Nelson. “Journalists can’t say one thing in private and another thing in public. And when we have that protection and that knowledge that in fact, there is the protection of the actual malice standard, and that is from the First Amendment. We can be assured that journalists will go ahead and report the truth and will do so with the full freedom the First Amendment allows.”
“Your team had mentioned earlier that this is sort of the first step,” said correspondent Sarah Sidner. “What happens next for Dominion? What does this mean for other lawsuits against other networks that were promoting false theories about the 2020 election?”
“That’s a great question,” said Nelson. “This is one of seven lawsuits. This one settled today. There are six left. And I think it sends a message to the other six lawsuits that accountability is coming as well. It’s not over. We have lawsuits against Newsmax, against One America News, against Sidney Powell, against Rudolph Giuliani and Mike Lindell and MyPillow and Patrick Byrne. And many of them are still propagating these lies about the election, and they are still having an effect.”
“So we intend to hold people accountable because, as we have said, the truth really does matter and if you are lying, that has consequences,” Nelson added. “It had a consequence for Dominion in the … grievous blow to the reputation that it had over the past couple of years and the threats the death threats that the company really continues to receive, and it had a consequence for Fox. Today they paid nearly three quarters of a billion dollars.”
Watch the segment below or at this link.
Justin Nelson says Dominion is just getting started with legal action
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