Newsmax has agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $67 million to settle the voting software firm’s defamation lawsuit over the right-wing network’s promotion of baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
The settlement was first revealed in a financial filing on Monday, noting that the company came to terms with the conservative channel last week. Newsmax has agreed to pay $27 million to Dominion this month and an additional $40 million over the next two years.
“We are pleased to have settled this matter,” a Dominion spokesperson said on Monday, declining to offer any additional comment.
In a defiant statement posted online after submitting the filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as required for a publicly traded company, Newsmax maintained that it was merely covering both sides of the 2020 presidential election.
“Newsmax believed it was critically important for the American people to hear both sides of the election disputes that arose in 2020,” the network stated. “We stand by our coverage as fair, balanced, and conducted within professional standards of journalism.”
Newsmax also claimed that “despite its confidence in its reporting,” the network “determined the Delaware Court with Judge Eric Davis presiding over the case would not provide a fair trial wherein the company could present standard libel defenses to a jury.”
Davis, as Newsmax noted, was the same judge who presided over Dominion’s similar defamation lawsuit against Fox News, which resulted in the conservative cable giant paying out a record $787.5 million in 2023 to settle the case just as the trial was about to start.
Dominion, as it did with Newsmax, accused Fox News of promoting Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen” due to fraudulent voting machines, all in an effort to boost television ratings. Following Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, Newsmax experienced a surge in viewership as its hosts and guests embraced election denialism on-air.
“Judge Davis also presided over the case of Dominion vs. Fox News where he was harshly criticized by then Fox’s chief legal officer for his actions and rulings,” Newsmax wrote in its online article.
“They dodged a MOAB,” one Newsmax insider told The Independent about the network’s settlement, invoking the colloquially named “Mother of All Bombs.” Dominion had initially sued for over a billion dollars, an amount that would have almost assuredly put the second-tier cable news channel out of business.
Earlier this spring, Davis ruled that Newsmax had defamed Dominion by falsely accusing the company of rigging the election against Trump, stating that it would be up to a jury to decide whether Newsmax committed “actual malice” against Dominion and if the network should be required to pay millions of dollars in damages.
Notably, the same day of Davis’ ruling, Trump signed an executive order taking aim at Susman Godfrey, one of the law firms representing Dominion in its legal fights against right-wing figures and media companies who parroted pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the company. “This firm is very involved in the election misconduct,” Trump senior aide Stephen Miller said about Susman Godfrey.
Originally, the trial between Newsmax and Dominion was supposed to take place on April 28. Shortly before it was to start, however, Davis announced that it had been pushed back.
Late last year, Newsmax also reached a confidential settlement in a similar lawsuit filed by voting software company Smartmatic. It was later revealed in a regulatory filing that Newsmax had paid Smartmatic $40 million to settle the complaint. Fox News, meanwhile, is aggressively fighting a $2.7 billion complaint from Smarmatic that is still waiting to go to trial — and the network has secured some key court victories in recent months.
While it wasn’t readily known how Newsmax and Dominion came to the amount for the settlement, it could be largely tied to the difference in corporate size and viewership between the overtly pro-Trump channel and Fox News, its much larger competitor. Generally, Newsmax pulls in about a tenth of Fox News’ ratings, thus suggesting that Dominion was willing to settle for a comparably smaller sum.
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