Fox News-Dominion reach settlement after mediator swooped in

New York [US], April 20 : Executives at Fox News gradually accepted a terrible slog of a trial followed by a potential loss in front of a jury in the massive USD 1.6 billion lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems for months as the pre-trial proceedings dragged on and unflattering internal comments continued leaking into the public eye, The Washington Post reported.

The highest-ranking lawyer at Fox Corp., the business that owns Fox News, Viet Dinh, had offered a glimmer of hope. According to people familiar with internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations, Viet Dinh had walked company founder and chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who is Fox's chief executive, through the legal issues and reassured them that company could eventually prevail on appeal, even if it required going all the way to the Supreme Court.

But, at the conclusion of Friday's hearing in the high-profile defamation action against Fox News, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M Davis instructed the attorneys for both businesses to try to resolve their disagreements. He pleaded with them to try and find some common ground as the trial was scheduled to start on Monday. The parties complied, and their solicitors spent the weekend trying to reach an agreement through negotiation. They ran out of time and sent an emergency email on Sunday morning to longtime mediator Jerry Roscoe, who was floating down the Danube River, as per The Washington Post.

The stakes were clear as calculations by both compes slowly came to fruition: Dominion was seeking retribution for Fox's role in disseminating the untrue claim that Dominion machines had been used to steal the White House from former president Donald Trump, a claim that helped spark violence on January 6, 2021, and, more than two years later, this significant defamation battle in court.

Nevertheless, there remained one final opportunity for resolution on the eve of the most anticipated libel lawsuit in a generation.

Recalling the dramatic email, he received while on vacation, Roscoe said. "Would I be willing to mediate an important case?"

There was no indication that the two compes' positions had changed in public. As a result, it came as a surprise on Sunday night when the court's public information officer sent out a strange note announcing that Judge Davis would postpone the trial by one day. At the time, dozens of reporters were settling into their hotels in Wilmington, Delaware, preparing for a weeks-long stay. Only the promise that Davis will reveal more in court the next morning was made; no explanation was offered, read a report published in The Washington Post.

The Washington Post was informed by two persons with knowledge of the situation on Sunday night that the postponement was made to give the parties time to try and come to an agreement. One person claimed that the court had insisted on the talks, which diminished hopes of success.

Roscoe said that he ordered calls with the solicitors for both sides in order to ascertain their red lines. He brought them together for their first call on Monday morning.

After an hour, Davis only briefly called the court to order before announcing that he would proceed with seating a jury in 24 hours and asserting that such delays in complex lawsuits were hardly "unusual." Davis made a few low-key remarks in court, but Dominion only sent one attorneya sign that other matters may have been more important.

Roscoe claimed that initially, hopes were low. The chief trial lawyers for the firms, Justin Nelson for Dominion and Dan Webb for Fox, played minor roles because they were too busy continuing to prepare for the anticipated courtroom confrontation.

Throughout the court proceedings, Fox employees and executives had watched in terror as their unfiltered, and frequently violent, internal remarks against one another and Trump became public. Many of Fox News' senior executives, including CEO Suzanne Scott, joined the company when it first started, and some of them have never held another position before. And ever since Roger Ailes, the late co-founder of Fox News, was fired in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal in 2016, Fox has been without a strong leader, as per The Washington Post.

The judge had handed down harsh judgements against the business, including that Fox News had broadcast untruths about Dominion that had injured the company's reputation. Only if it had done so deliberately or with reckless contempt for the facts would a jury be left to make that decision.

Fox, however, argued that by refusing to agree to a settlement, it was defending the First Amendment and that Dominion was unfairly holding it responsible for airing charges that at the time were being supported by the president and his attorneys.

Murdoch himself was inclined to settle the matter financially, as he has done many times in his career, the people familiar with the Fox deliberations said, in spite of the assurances from Dinh, a trusted Murdoch adviser (and godfather to one of Lachlan's sons), who had taken on an outsized role at Fox Corp.

They were still standing still by Monday night, and both parties went to bed anticipating a trial the following day.

Yet Roscoe was progressing outside the courtroom.

Roscoe said that he realised right away that the financial demand made by Dominion was not the only thing separating them. They were also divided about how Fox would acknowledge the court's ruling that it had propagated lies about the company in a press statement.

Even after Fox's allegedly defamatory comments, Fox claimed in court that Dominion's actual income total for 2022 was the second-highest in company history and exceeded its expectations for that year. According to Fox, this refuted Dominion's assertion that Fox's actions had seriously harmed its company.

Additionally, Fox gained confidence from an email its lawyers received on Friday from Dominion saying that Dominion was not going to "be presenting its claim for lost profits damages to the jury, given that it is duplicative of the lost enterprise value damages."

While Dominion always stuck to its claim of USD 1.6 billion, people familiar with Fox's mind set say the company's attorneys believed they had finally been able to publicly dent Dominion's central claim. Fox executives were also worried that settling with Dominion could cause Smartmatic, another voting technology company suing the network, to demand an equally large payout, reported Washington Post.

A person familiar with the discussions said, "If you give a large settlement here after discovery, it sets such a bad precedent."

On Monday, no information was made public, despite the fact that members of Dominion's legal team were seen entering and leaving a conference room they had leased at a hotel close to the Wilmington courthouse. Close associates of the case issued a warning that the conversations had not been successful.

So, a trial appeared likely at 9 am on Tuesday even to the parties involved. There were so many attorneys for both sides crammed into the courtroom's well and a row of seats behind them that one Dominion attorney was compelled to perch, hanging off the bench.

Before 4 o'clock, Davis made his way back to the bench. He said, "The parties have resolved the case."

Top executives at Fox's offices had been preparing to tune in to an audio line provided by the court to listen to opening statements and were as shocked as outside observers at the announcement.

A person familiar with the company said, "They kept this incredible close-hold until the very, very last minutes."

A lawyer for Dominion told reporters outside the court that Fox had agreed to pay USD 787.5 million and declared that the truth had won out.

Fox, in a statement, said, "We are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects FOX's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues."

Employees who had been with the company since the 2020 election, according to a Dominion executive, were emotional and relieved at the results, which included some degree of external validation that the assertions had always been untrue, reported The Washington Post.