NEW YORK — A New York appeals court reinstated defamation claims against Rudy Giuliani and Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro over false claims they made about voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Giuliani and Pirro were dismissed last year from the case filed by voting-machine maker Smartmatic Corp., which, along with Dominion Voting Systems Inc., was widely accused of rigging the election against Donald Trump as part of a vast conspiracy theory involving corrupt Democrats, foreign hackers and software linked to Venezuela. But the appellate court in Manhattan overruled that decision Tuesday.
Smartmatic adequately alleged that the two “made defamatory statements about plaintiffs’ involvement in the 2020 Presidential election while knowing that the statements were false, or at least with reckless disregard for the truth,” the five-judge panel said.
The company is also suing Fox News, Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, who helped spread the conspiracy theory on-air. Smartmatic’s claims against former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell were dismissed last year for lack of jurisdiction reasons and were not reinstated.
The appeals court on Tuesday did dismiss Fox News’s parent, Fox Corp., from the suit, saying its ownership of the network wasn’t sufficient to make it liable for defamation claims.
Giuliani’s lawyer, Adam S. Katz, didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.
In a statement, Fox News said it was merely reporting news about allegations being made by the then-president and his lawyers.
“We are confident we will prevail as freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected, in addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported, and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs,” the network said.
In its ruling, the appeals court said Smartmatic had adequately argued that Fox News and hosts did “not merely report the newsworthy fact that the President’s campaign lawyers were recklessly making statements conveying false information.”
The judges said, “In fact, according to the allegations in the complaint, Fox News, Dobbs, and Bartiromo stated that Smartmatic’s election technology and software were widely used in the 2020 election and in Dominion machines to switch votes, when they actually knew, or easily could have known had they not purposefully avoided publicly available knowledge, that in 2020, the Smartmatic technology was used only in Los Angeles County and that the vote-switching claims otherwise had no support.”
