Fox Gets Yet Another Defamation Suit In Delaware State Court
Please, oh, please let there be discovery!
(Photo by Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)
Fox News just wrote a $787 million check to Dominion Voting Systems after spending months defaming the company on its airwaves. Among the lawyers representing Dominion in that case were Brian and Michael Farnan of the Wilmington, Delaware, firm Farnan LLP. And so Fox is probably not thrilled to see their names on a new defamation complaint filed in the Superior Court of the Delaware on behalf of former Department of Homeland Security official Nina Jankowicz.
Jankowicz is a noted scholar of disinformation studies who found herself at the center of a media maelstrom last year when she briefly the head of a DHS body called the Disinformation Governance Board. According to the complaint, the Board was “an internal working group with no operating authority or capability” and “no ability to intervene, respond to, or prevent the spread of disinformation.” Instead it served to “coordinate between federal agencies and officials who track and respond to disinformation that poses a national security threat—for example, disinformation spread by adversarial states and transnational criminal enterprises.”
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Nevertheless, Fox relentlessly portrayed Jankowicz as leading an Orwellian enforcement body set on censoring Americans’ speech, mentioning her or the Board at least 93 times in the week after it was formed. Relying on an obviously manipulated video from Twitter in which she was portrayed as saying that she intended to edit tweets, as well as a funny TikTok in which Jankowicz sang a Mary Poppins parody about misinformation, the network’s regular cast of bullies made her the face of a non-existent campaign by the Biden administration to undermine free speech.
Laura Ingraham called her “your new Disinformation Czar” who “will protect you from free expression and the fanatics who support it,” while Sean Hannity described her as “the administration’s official purveyor of truth” and “the person that polices our thoughts.”
“Would a moderate president create a disinformation bureau to actually police speech? That belongs in communist China, not America,” shrieked Jeanine Pirro, adding that “The woman is not qualified to run anything, let alone tell us what we can and cannot say.”
“If this Ministry of Truth is allowed to continue, and a law enforcement body of the US government is allowed to declare edicts about what is true and what isn’t, the constitutional republic is dead as a doornail, this thing is over and done with,” ranted Dan Bongino.
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This led to an avalanche of harassment and threats of rape and violence for Jankowicz and her family, who were forced to leave their home for safety. At one point, she was getting at least one death threat every day.
In an analysis of approximately 50,000 tweets between April 2022 and April 2023 that reference Jankowicz’s Twitter handle @wiczipedia, nearly 2,000 tweets linked Jankowicz to extremist conspiracy theories, perceived totalitarianism, or satanism. More than 350 included antisemitic or misogynistic attacks against Jankowicz. 131 tweets threatened violence, hostile action, or advocated the use of Jankowicz’s personal information to target her.
In May of 2022, DHS scrapped the Board, and Jankowicz, who was then eight months pregnant, resigned from government service. But that didn’t end the harassment campaign by Fox and its hosts, who went on to claim that she’d been fired and continued to talk about her throughout 2022.
Tucker Carlson, who described the Board as a “Ministry of Truth” which planned to “get men with guns to tell you to shut up,” called her “an advocate for censoring any news that damaged the Biden administration,” and falsely claimed that she was “so embarrassing that the Biden administration had to fire Jankowicz.”
Carlson’s likely replacement Jesse Watters said that she’d been “yanked” by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and that she “got booted” from government service.
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In fact, she’d been offered a position as a policy advisor when the board was shuttered. She didn’t take it because she hoped to get out of the spotlight and end the campaign of harassment. But Fox apparently made no effort to verify any of its claims about her.
“This has had an immense impact for my family. I don’t think our security will ever be the same,” Jankowicz told the New York Times, which first reported the filing. “I want to make the point that this sort of disinformation and hate campaign doesn’t have a place in American media or American politics; that this isn’t what we stand for.”
The complaint alleges one count of defamation and defamation per se, and seeks unspecified damages to be determined by a jury. Luckily for Fox and its hosts, their lawyers are already acquainted with the Farnan brothers, so depositions should run smoothly.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.
