Getting back to Trumpville, John Matze, the lovely gentleman former CEO of Parler, is suing his former company and investors, including the cuddly and adorable Rebekah Mercer, for his fair share of the company.
My favorite part:
"While Mercer readily acknowledged and broadly boasted… that Parler was an enterprise worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not a billion dollars, she and others orchestrated a theft of Matze’s 40 percent ownership, claiming that it could be taken from him for a mere $3.00," Matze claims in the suit.
Dominion Voting Systems on Friday filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, arguing the cable news giant falsely claimed in an effort to boost faltering ratings that the voting company had rigged the 2020 election.
It’s the first defamation suit filed against a media outlet by the voting company, which was a target of misleading, false and bizarre claims spread by President Donald Trump and his allies in the aftermath of Trump’s election loss to Joe Biden…
They can use the same defense Tucker Carlson used: basically, it’s opinion, therefore covered under 1stA. And besides, what reasonable person would believe it?
Dominion may have to settle. I would advise: nothing under $500M.
If they promoted the Dominion accusations on just the ‘opinion’ sections I’d agree they have the ‘we are full of shit’ defence. If they repeated those accusations on the so called news segments they may be in a spot of bother.
Because they don’t say Dominion is guilty. They say "This guys says Dominion is guilty’.
And they go down the line.
“Trump says Dominion switched votes”
“Powell says Dominion stole the election”
“Guiliani says Dominion says Dominion is crooked”
“Shitty pillow scammer and ‘ex’ crack addict says Dominion is evil”
Technically, they are not making statements, just reporting the statements of others. Over and over.
That really isn’t going to make much of a difference if Dominion succeeds on the actual malice argument. If you’re a billion-dollar media enterprise you don’t really get out of a defamation action by saying “we never said it, we just had multiple guests over many weeks saying stuff we knew was wrong.”
Of course, the actual malice standard is a very high bar, but from the analyses I’ve seen, I think Dominion has a pretty fair shot of succeeding.