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Egregious lies about the 2020 presidential election are going to cost Newsmax $67 million.
To avert a high-stakes trial, the right-wing cable channel has agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $27 million this month and another $40 million in the next two years.
The settlement deal was struck last week and disclosed in a Newsmax financial filing on Monday.
“We are pleased to have settled this matter,” a Dominion spokesperson told CNN, declining to comment further.
There was no indication that Newsmax will offer any on-air apology or acknowledgment of its false claims about Dominion, a voting hardware and software company that became the target of many pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
The lawsuit was filed against Newsmax in August 2021, in the wake of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat. After losing, Trump and his allies, including many Newsmax guests and on-air personalities, spread the baseless lie that the election results were fraudulent.
Earlier this year a Delaware judge ruled that Newsmax did air defamatory statements about Dominion by falsely accusing the company of rigging the 2020 election. The judge said it would be up to a jury to decide if the smears were intentional, and if so, how much Dominion deserved in damages. But the expected April trial was postponed by the judge, citing a professional matter unrelated to the case.
Then money talked, just as it did when Fox News settled with Dominion on the verge of a similar trial in 2023.
Fox agreed to pay $787.5 million, a gobsmacking sum that weighed on Fox Corp’s quarterly earnings at the time.
There was no immediate indication of how Newsmax and Dominion arrived at the $67 million sum on Monday. Newsmax’s TV ratings, however, are roughly one-tenth of Fox’s ratings.
Nearly five years after the pro-Trump campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election, some lawsuits by victims of the smears continue to wind their way through the courts.
Fox is aggressively fighting a defamation suit by the voting tech company Smartmatic. Newsmax agreed to a $40 million settlement with Smartmatic last fall, on the eve of a trial.
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