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Rupert Murdoch May Be Forced to Testify in Dominion’s Defamation Suit Against Fox

Rupert Murdoch may be forced to take the stand after all. Eric Davis, the Delaware Superior Court judge overseeing Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News, said he wouldn’t stand in Dominion’s way if the election technology company wants to subpoena the 92-year-old Fox Corporation chairman, as well as his son, Lachlan. “If Dominion wants to bring them in live, they need to do a trial subpoena and I would not quash it. I would compel them to come,” Davis said during a pretrial hearing Wednesday, per CNBC. Dominion had urged the judge to compel both Murdochs to appear live in a letter filed to the court earlier on Monday. Dominion is also seeking the in-person testimony of former House speaker and current Fox board member Paul Ryan, as well as Viet Dinh, Fox’s chief legal and policy officer, both of whom Davis would also compel to testify, should Dominion subpoena them. 

The case will go to trial later this month, barring a settlement. Already, the proceedings are shaping up to be quite the spectacle; internal communications around Fox’s 2020 election coverage, brought to light as part of the discovery process in Dominion’s case, have dominated headlines in recent months, offering a rare glimpse into Murdoch’s empire. Meanwhile, Fox has tried to prevent the elder Murdoch from giving in-person testimony, citing hours of taped deposition the executive has already given. Likewise, the media company has argued Murdoch, his son Lachlan, Dinh and Ryan weren’t directly involved in the broadcasts in question. “Fox and Dominion have made these four parties very relevant,” Davis said Wednesday. During a pretrial hearing last week, Davis suggested he was unconvinced by Fox’s attempts to keep Murdoch off the stand. Top on-air personalities including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Maria Bartiromo will be available to testify at trial, Fox News said in a letter filed this week.

“Dominion clearly wants to continue generating misleading stories from their friends in the media to distract from their weak case.  Demanding witnesses who had nothing to do with the challenged broadcasts is just the latest example of their political crusade in search of a financial windfall,” Fox said in a statement.

Dominion is suing Fox over its 2020 election coverage, when the network amplified election lies pushed by Donald Trump and his allies. Dominion has claimed that Fox News knowingly spread false information about the company for the sake of juicing ratings and profits, while Fox has argued that its coverage is protected by free speech and press freedom rights, and that it was just neutrally reporting on newsworthy claims by a sitting president. 

To win their case, Dominion has to prove that Fox acted with actual malice—meaning that the network knew the claims it was making about Dominion were false and aired them anyway, or that it acted with a reckless disregard for the truth. There is a historically high bar for meeting such a legal standard. Still, Davis has made clear that he believes the evidence presented in the case has been strong enough to merit a jury’s review. “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding” demonstrates that it “is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” Davis wrote in his decision to proceed to trial. 

Davis has made clear that the trial won’t be a free-for-all. One topic he’s urged parties to stay away from: the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. As the Associated Press reports, Davis said he does not “see Jan. 6 as relevant in this case,” during a hearing Wednesday, noting, “I know that probably shocks everyone.” Dominion has alleged that it was defamed by comments made on 17 programs that aired between November 8, 2020 and January 26, 2021, as well as three tweets by former Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs. Davis noted that only one of those programs aired after the Jan. 6 attack, and made no mention to the insurrection. “What parties were thinking in January is not very relevant, if at all, to what happened in November and December,” Davis said. “Fox is not the cause of Jan. 6 in its relation to Dominion,” he continued, adding, “I do think that’s a really big issue that has to be stayed away from.”