Lawrence O’Donnell railed against Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch for “stupidly” leading his company to “the losing end of the biggest defamation case in history” after it reached a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems related to lies Fox News told about the 2020 election.
“The stupidity in the executive offices at Fox and at the anchor desks led to this outcome which was completely avoidable,” the MSNBC host said during his show on Wednesday. “Someone at Fox could’ve said to the people hosting their shows, ‘You can let Rudy Giuliani tell any lie he wants for as long as he wants and at the end of it all you have to say is, ‘If that’s true, this is a terrible situation and we’re going to have to do something about that,’ and Fox never could have been sued. Because the host would have said if that’s true. Those are the legal safe words that save you $787 million — and everyone at Fox was too stupid to know those legal safe words. Rupert Murdoch was too stupid to tell his people to use those legal safe words. And so Fox lost and truth won.”
Some on social media expressed disappointment in the outcome, arguing that a trial would’ve better served the public interest. O’Donnell replied that the reaction is “completely understandable,” but acknowledged that “civil litigation is usually an inadvertent remedy to harm done.” He also argued that Dominion’s lawyers already secured a “huge win” with the settlement and proved everything Fox said about the company was untrue before even going to trial.
“If the Dominion case went to the jury, they were not going to be able to order Tucker Carlson to apologize to anyone. The jury was only going to have a verdict form that allowed them to fill in the amount of money that Fox would have to pay for what the company did. And if that jury awarded an amount of money that the judge or an appeals court considered excessive, they can simply reduce that amount of money and reduce it dramatically,” O’Donnell said. “The amount of money Fox has to pay to Dominion immediately is the largest amount of money in the history of defamation cases in the world. For people schooled in civil litigation who were hoping Fox would lose, there is nothing to be disappointed about.”
He added that Dominion’s lawyers would have simply asked Murdoch the same questions from his deposition that were already made public, where he “fully incriminated himself as a full participant and in effect the leader of the Fox conspiracy to invite and support the lies told about the election by Rudy Giuliani and others on Fox.”
In response to criticism online that Dominion settled for less than half of the $1.6 billion in damages that they were seeking, O’Donnell said that the amount in the written complaint was never what they expected to get.
“It’s always at least double what their highest hope is from the jury. So no, Dominion did not settle for half. Dominion settled for every penny that they could possibly get out of Fox and it’s real money that will be paid right now. Jury verdicts in civil cases are theoretical money that you have to chase for years and years and years to try to collect. The Dominion company is worth a tiny fraction of what it got from Fox in that settlement. It is extremely likely that if Dominion won that amount or more from a Delaware jury that Fox could have successfully appealed that verdict as excessive and had the award dramatically reduced, to, say, double or triple the value of the Dominion company.”
He emphasized that the damages awarded by the jury has to make “some economic sense” and that they “can’t just pick a huge number to make them feel good.”
“It is entirely possible that the jury could be completely convinced of everything, of all of the Dominion evidence presented in the case, and awarded Dominion a lower amount than Dominion is getting in the settlement,” he added. “There’s absolutely no question that Dominion would spend the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s life trying to collect that money if it was awarded to them by the jury.”
Watch the full segment in the video above.
