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Before pulling back from the brink of a trial, Fox News and Dominion Voting systems faced a stern deadline — not from an impatient judge or jury, but from a man on a Danube River cruise with his wife half a world away.
A mediator hired late Sunday pushed the two sides toward a $787 million settlement that brought a stunning end to the most-watched media libel case in decades, one that sought to put a price on lies told about the 2020 presidential election on conservative America’s most popular news outlet.
“It’s a deadline that I always impose because I know that once a jury is empaneled and opening statements are made, then one or other of the parties will dig into their positions,” Jerry Roscoe, of the Washington-based JAMS mediation service, said Wednesday. “It makes negotiations much more difficult.”
As the haggling went on, over the phone and in back rooms of a Delaware courthouse, lawyers, journalists and spectators waited as a scheduled 1:30 p.m. start of the trial came and went Tuesday.
Finally, two minutes before 4 p.m., Superior Court Judge Eric Davis emerged with an almost matter-of-fact announcement, given the stakes.
“The parties have resolved their case,” he said.
It was a settlement months in the making, since the Colorado-based voting technology firm sued Fox for $1.6 billion, alleging its business was harmed and employees threatened when it was baselessly accused of rigging its voting machines against former President Donald Trump in 2020.
In the two months prior to the scheduled start of the trial, a mountain of evidence — some damning, some merely embarrassing — showed many Fox executives and on-air talent didn’t believe allegations aired mostly on shows hosted by Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro. At the time, they feared angering Trump fans in the audience with the truth.
Davis had ordered the two sides to try to mediate their differences last December, but it was a non-starter for Dominion. The company didn’t want the case to end without all of the evidence it had gathered made public. That happened through February and March, with document dumps that essentially outlined the case Dominion would have presented at trial.
“That was something we had committed to from the beginning,” Dominion CEO John Poulos said Wednesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “We had complete support with our partners, and it’s something that we owed to our customers.”
Fox had argued that it was airing newsworthy allegations made by Trump aides, and that Dominion’s case was an attack on press freedom.
