Fox anchor Jesse Watters texted a colleague, “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL,” according to legal filings. Watters later testified under oath he never found such claims credible.
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John Lamparski/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
The allegations carry a familiar ring:
Fox News aired outrageous lies that an election software company rigged votes in the 2020 presidential elections for Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Behind the scenes, Fox News’ controlling owners, executives and biggest stars didn’t believe the wild claims from President Trump and his allies. Nonetheless, the voting tech company’s officials received death threats. Its reputation and financial prospects were badly damaged.
These claims are contained in legal filings at the heart of a hearing that will take place in a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday afternoon over whether a multi-billion dollar defamation lawsuit against Fox News should be allowed to proceed to a full jury trial.
The lawsuit is being brought by Smartmatic, a London-based voting technology firm that played a limited role in the 2020 race but was, nonetheless, accused on Fox shows of taking votes away from Trump and throwing them to Biden. Smartmatic is suing for $2.7 billion.
The reason these allegations are so familiar is that the company’s claims closely echo those from a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox News stars and their on-air guests also blamed that company for Trump’s loss, as they served up a stew of baseless conspiracy theories about the election.
In both the Dominion and Smartmatic suits, Fox’s top hosts and executives were revealed to have desperately sought to appease the network’s pro-Trump viewers. Viewers peeled away from Fox in droves after it became the first major U.S network to project that Biden would prevail in the key state of Arizona on election night in 2020. Trump attacked Fox and encouraged his fans to tune into right-wing alternatives like Newsmax and OANN instead.
In 2023, a Delaware judge found that Fox had defamed Dominion ahead of the trial. On the eve of the trial – and founder Rupert Murdoch’s scheduled public testimony – Fox paid $787.5 million to resolve the case. The sum is considered to be a record in U.S. media litigation.
The network made no admission of error but released this statement: “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”
Neither Smartmatic nor Fox would comment for this story. Smartmatic sued Fox News in February 2021, before Dominion did, but the Dominion case moved briskly through Delaware’s streamlined trial system. Smartmatic named several co-defendants, including such stars as the late Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, along with Trump’s legal advisers Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who were frequent guests.
In past remarks, Fox has pointed to what it says are clear distinctions between the two defamation cases: different jurisdictions, different judges, and different plaintiffs.
“The evidence shows that Smartmatic’s business and reputation were badly suffering long before any claims by President Trump’s lawyers on Fox News and that Smartmatic grossly inflated its damage claims to generate headlines and chill free speech,” Fox News said in a statement released through a spokesperson. “We are eager and ready to continue defending our press freedoms.”
As in the Dominion case, Fox has argued its hosts were engaging in legitimate coverage of newsworthy claims by newsworthy figures – the president and his legal advisers – and those claims had not yet worked its way through various legal proceedings. Trump’s campaign and his allies lost almost every legal and procedural challenge they filed to the election results.
In its court documents, Fox has also directed much of its legal energies to disputing Smartmatic’s claims about the voting technology company’s financial health, prospects and damages. And the network’s legal filings have questioned the firm’s stated origins and its actions abroad.
In October, federal prosecutors charged Smartmatic in a scheme to pay more than $1 million in bribes to a Philippine government official for contracts related to the 2016 national elections there. Company officials denied the allegations, contending the charges were “targeted, political and unjust.”
New York State Supreme Court Justice David B. Cohen rejected Fox’s request to put a hold on the litigation until after those criminal charges were fully tried.
Smartmatic was operating in just one jurisdiction in the U.S. during the 2020 elections: Los Angeles County, which was all but guaranteed to swing toward Biden in a heavily Democratic state. The company says it was on the brink of making big gains in the U.S. and abroad after the elections – only to have those business aspirations dashed by the way in which Fox stars amplified wild and unfounded claims from Trump allies.
Fox never retracted the claims. After Smartmatic threatened to sue, Fox aired an unusual segment featuring Eddie Perez, an outside voting technology and integrity expert. Perez was questioned by an off-camera producer. Perez shot down one allegation after another about Smartmatic. Fox broadcast it on the shows hosted by Bartiromo, Dobbs, and Pirro.
Perez told NPR he did not consider the segment a correction, but he said he was glad to offer Fox viewers accurate information after it so frequently ran what he considered election disinformation.
Evidence submitted in court filings suggests that, inside Fox, few believed the wild claims made on the air. Senior Fox executives and even its stars made clear privately they knew that Trump had lost, according to testimony and exchanges presented in the public record. The filings also reflect the way in which Fox stars saw their interests aligning with the interests of the Republican Party under Trump, even when they did not always agree with what he was saying.
Host Jesse Watters texted Fox News comic host Greg Gutfeld, “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL,” according to legal filings. Watters later testified under oath he never found such claims credible.
In court documents, Pirro was revealed to have lobbied then-Republican National Committee Chairperson Ronna McDaniel weeks ahead of the election to purchase copies of her book in bulk, as the RNC had done for Fox’s Sean Hannity.
“I’m the Number 1 watched show on all news cable all weekend,” Pirro texted, according to court records. “I work so hard for the President and party.” McDaniel demurred. (The exchange was first reported by the Guardian.)
Once Trump refused to accept the results of the election, Pirro – a former prosecutor – was among those who repeatedly amplified the false claims of fraud. She later testified that she did not think Trump was cheated of victory. Pirro is now the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
“Fox executives and its personalities have consistently lied to their viewers,” a spokesperson for Smartmatic said in a statement to NPR earlier this fall. “They knew what they were saying was untrue when they were willingly destroying Smartmatic’s reputation, though when under oath they admitted they knew better the whole time.”
According to its court filings, Smartmatic’s legal teams also unearthed a Fox News workplace survey from summer 2020 – as Trump ran for re-election – in which numerous staffers complained about the network’s bias.
“We need a recalibration of our standards of conduct for our [on-air] talent, as well as the truthfulness of our reporting,” one Fox employee wrote. “It often feels like our editorial view and specifically our on-air talent has changed to just working for the current administration and will say anything that will be flattering to them. It seems like there’s a fear that we cannot anger the president or his most zealous supporters, and have abdicated all pretense of truthful reporting; often allowing guests to say lies unchallenged, or saying false information ourselves to the detriment of our reputation.”
Other colleagues complained about cheerleading by Fox personalities and objected to multiple on-air stars “covertly advising” the president.
In court documents, Fox’s attorneys called the remarks incomplete and said they represented a cherrypicked handful of negative remarks. Fox noted it was designated a “Great Place to Work” by the organization conducting the workplace survey.
The day after Smartmatic sued Fox, the Fox Business Network canceled Dobbs’ show. Dobbs was never seen on Fox airwaves again. He died in July 2024.
Fox has a record of playing hardball but ultimately settling cases close to trial, as it did – albeit very late in the game – in the Dominion case. (The Murdochs did much the same before settling with Prince Harry and a prominent British politician in January in a case involving their U.K. newspapers.) The company, so far, is maintaining a similar stance publicly in this case, gambling that Smartmatic’s own shortcomings will help forestall the need for a similar outcome.
