Fox News Challenges Smartmatic’s $2.7 Billion Claim For Damages: “Divorced From Reality”
17.03.2022 - 23:49
/ deadline.com
A week after a New York judge let Smartmatic move forward with its defamation lawsuit against Fox News, the network is challenging the elections systems company’s whopping $2.7 billion claim of damages.
In an answer and counterclaim filed on Thursday, the network said that the billions that Smartmatic seeks are based on assumption that are “divorced from reality.”
“According to Smartmatic—a company that has been mired in controversy for the better part of two decades and has not turned a profit since 2016—it stood to make $3.1 billion over the next five years,” Fox News’ legal team wrote in their filing (Read it here). “Even a preliminary, pre-discovery investigation has thoroughly debunked that implausible claim.”
Last week, New York Judge David Cohen rejected Fox News’ efforts to dismiss Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit, which it filed last year over the network’s amplification of unfounded claims that it rigged the 2020 presidential election. He found that there was a “substantial basis for plaintiffs’ claim that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth.”
Fox News has already filed a notice of appeal of Cohen’s decision.
In its latest filing, Fox News is also seeking relief under New York’s anti-SLAPP law, designed to prevent plaintiffs from filing lawsuits as a way of stifling free speech over matters of public concern. One of Fox News’ central defenses is that it was covering just such a matter of public concern: Allegations that President Donald Trump and his surrogates made in the aftermath of the election.
Fox News contended that Smartmatic’s
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