The January 6 defamation trial is not a good place to bring up that day
The 2020 Insurrection and Fox News: A High-Stakes Defamation Trial Revisited by a Delaware Superior Court Judge
After the 2020 election, some employees have faced death threats and other harassment, and this was the topic of the discussion. It is not possible for Fox to control what third parties say because they don’t directly control what the threats are.
The Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis told a hearing on Tuesday that it wouldn’t be appropriate to use January 6 as evidence in a case about whether Fox News influenced the insurrection.
These extraordinary moves on the eve of the trial are the most recent blow to Fox News as it tries to avoid a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit that was filed after the 2020 presidential election.
In a major ruling last month, Davis rejected several legal defenses that Fox News hoped to use to either shut down the lawsuit, or to argue in front of the jury that it is not liable for the alleged defamation.
The judge ruled that Fox can’t bring up broadcasts where reporters accurately fact-checked Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, to prove that other broadcasts that amplified those lies weren’t defamatory.
Those other broadcasts “are not relevant” to the case, Davis said, because “you can’t absolve yourself of defamation by putting someone else on at a different time” who told the truth about Dominion.
But Davis warned the network’s lawyers not to undercut or circumvent his rulings during their opening statements to the jury, when the high-stakes defamation trial kicks off next week.
Davis told the lawyers from both sides, that he had sent them some of the death threats he had received.
The Fox News Special Master: Investigating a Left-Right Symmetric Tuning of the Fox News News News Dilemma
The judge overseeing the case against Fox News plans to appoint an attorney who will investigate whether the right-wing network lied to the court and hid evidence.
There has been misrepresentations to the court. Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis expressed his frustration and exasperation with Fox attorneys during a pre- trial hearing on Wednesday.
The special master will look into what sanctions might be appropriate against Fox, including potentially instructing jurors in the case that Fox inappropriately blocked Dominion from obtaining key evidence.
Fox denies wrongdoing and says it properly disclosed Murdoch’s roles in its public financial filings. The attorney for Fox said Wednesday that nobody deliberately kept information from the company.
