Fox News Challenges Smartmatic’s $2.7 Billion Claim For Damages: “Divorced From Reality”

“According to Smartmatic—a company that has been mired in controversy for the better part of two decades and has not turned a profit since 2016—it stood to make $3.1 billion over the next five years,” Fox News’ legal team wrote in their filing (Read it here). “Even a preliminary, pre-discovery investigation has thoroughly debunked that implausible claim.”

Last week, New York Judge David Cohen rejected Fox News’ efforts to dismiss Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit, which it filed last year over the network’s amplification of unfounded claims that it rigged the 2020 presidential election. He found that there was a “substantial basis for plaintiffs’ claim that, at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth.”

Fox News has already filed a notice of appeal of Cohen’s decision.

In its latest filing, Fox News is also seeking relief under New York’s anti-SLAPP law, designed to prevent plaintiffs from filing lawsuits as a way of stifling free speech over matters of public concern. One of Fox News’ central defenses is that it was covering just such a matter of public concern: Allegations that President Donald Trump and his surrogates made in the aftermath of the election.

Fox News contended that Smartmatic’s damages claim was a way to grab headlines yet was “pure fiction.”

The $2.7 billion in damages are “premised on the implausible notion that a company that has been losing money hand over fist the better part of a decade was on the brink of accomplishing the historic feat of 75% earnings growth over the next five years,” Fox News’ legal team wrote.

The lawyers included a financial analysis of Smartmatic from David R. Fischel, president of Compass Lexecon and professor of law and business emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School. He wrote that the $2.7 billion claim assumes a spike in revenue and profits over the next five years, even though the company has not turned a profit for the last five, with more than $82 million in red ink. Fischel also contended that more than 80% of Smartmatic’s claimed damages came from outside of North America, and that the company had not established a causal link to those damages and the coverage it received in the United States.

Smartmatic’s attorney, Eric Connolly, said in response, “It is ironic that Fox claims that Smartmatic’s lawsuit is without basis after the Court found that the lawsuit had a substantial basis in law and fact.  The decisions of courts across the country regarding these defamatory statements speak for themselves; and, the courts are saying something very different than Fox.”