Fox News agreed to settle a voting machine maker's defamation lawsuit claiming the network aired false claims that it rigged the 2020 presidential election against former President Donald Trump.
The network reached the settlement with Dominion Voting Systems just after a jury for the trial in Wilmington, Delaware, was selected on Tuesday and just before opening statements. "The case has been resolved and it’s been resolved because of you," Judge Eric Davis told the jury Tuesday.
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The suit alleged current and former Fox hosts including Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Jeanine Pirro offered guests such as attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani a platform to make repeated defamatory statements claiming the company used computer algorithms to move votes away from Trump to then-candidate Joe Biden.
Fox contended it was reporting on matters of national importance and that its broadcasts were protected as free speech under the First Amendment.
Fox News released a brief statement acknowledging “the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false”.
The settlement comes months after courtroom disputes between the two parties, which had been viewed as a potentially precedent-changing moment for defamation law that could have altered the financial health and public reputation of one of the country's largest and most successful cable news networks.
By agreeing to settle, Fox will shield itself from what may have been a potentially revealing trial of several weeks focusing on internal quibbles among staff around the time of the 2020 election.
Before the settlement, the judge previously ruled that the network's owner, 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch, could not avoid testimony during the trial.
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“If Dominion wants to bring them live, they need to do a trial subpoena and I would not quash it and I would compel them to come,” Davis said earlier this month in a public hearing. “I know it’s difficult, I know they have very large loads and other focuses, but maybe we can work on trying to push the least amount of inconvenience on them as possible.”
Terms of the settlement have not been disclosed.