Smartmatic Accuses Fox, Rupert Murdoch of Destroying Evidence in $2.7 Billion Defamation Lawsuit Over 2020 Election

In a new court filing, Smartmatic accused top executives at Fox News, including Rupert Murdoch, of intentionally destroying evidence pertaining to the company’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit.

Smartmatic is suing the conservative cable news channel for defamation related to the numerous false claims Fox News hosts made about voter fraud in 2020. Those claims included false accusations that voting machine companies like Smartmatic somehow participated in such fraud in order to rig the 2020 election against Donald Trump.

Fox News previously reached a $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over those same false claims of election fraud in April 2023.

In the new filing, Smartmatic asserted that Fox News executives — including Murdoch, his son Lachlan Murdoch and Fox’s chief legal officer Viet Dinh — “orchestrated the destruction of text messages across all levels of their corporate hierarchy… despite a clear duty to preserve evidence.”

Further, the filing continues, this destruction “was extensive and willful.”

Fox naturally denies the accusations and in a statement, representatives said, “Smartmatic weakly attempts to resurrect stale, baseless discovery issues that actually were disclosed by Fox and resolved two years ago. These issues have no bearing on the merits of Smartmatic’s case, which has fallen apart at every turn.”

Co-defendants in Smartmartic’s 2023 defamation lawsuit against Fox Corporation also include on-air personalities Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, along with Debi Segura, the administrator of the late Lou Dobbs’ estate.

Smartmatic has previously settled defamation lawsuits with other conservative news channels over similar false claims of voting fraud: Newsmax revealed in a regulatory filing in March that it paid out $40 million to the Florida-based voting systems company, and One America News Network (OAN) settled a suit in April 2024.

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