'A decade of business failure': Fox News, Smartmatic trade jabs in sharply-worded memos in defamation fight
Source: Law & Crime
May 1st, 2025, 2:36 pm
In a pair of competing and stinging court filings, Fox News and voting machine company Smartmatic Corp aimed to convince a judge that each side had the upper hand in a long-running defamation battle. On Wednesday, in memorandums of law in support of respective motions for summary judgment filed in New York Supreme Court, both defendant and plaintiff savaged the other in no uncertain terms.
In the Fox News filing, attorneys argued the voting machine company was using the legal process to shore up its flagging business. “[T]his lawsuit was manufactured to chill speech and generate headlines by a failing election company that was in financial free fall and saw allegations made by the President’s lawyers as a pathway to profitability,” the filing reads.
In service of this effort, Fox News directly contrasted Smartmatic with Dominion — the other big name voting machine company embroiled in false and unsupported conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. “Smartmatic’s strategy in this case has been to draft behind the rulings in the Dominion lawsuit,” the Fox News filing goes on. “But years of discovery have confirmed one thing above all else: Smartmatic is not Dominion.”
In April 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion some $787.5 million in order to settle a defamation lawsuit. In that lawsuit, Dominion claimed Fox News knowingly smeared them with false claims — turning the “flame” of election fraud lies into a “forest fire.”
Read more: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/a-decade-of-business-failure-fox-news-smartmatic-trade-jabs-in-sharply-worded-memos-in-defamation-fight/
Link to FILINGS -
Fox (PDF viewer) - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25924888-smartmatic-v-fox-msj-fox/
Fox (PDF) - https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25924888/smartmatic-v-fox-msj-fox.pdf
Smartmatic (PDF viewer) - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25924965-smartmatic-v-fox-msj-smartmatic/
Smartmatic (PDF) - https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25924965/smartmatic-v-fox-msj-smartmatic.pdf