Another day, another frivolous lawsuit against Fox News. These are not heady days for the cable news powerhouse, and now former Biden administration official Nina Jankowicz has joined the bandwagon and filed a defamation claim against the network.
She, of course, gained immediate worldwide fame after her appointment as czar of Biden’s ominously named Disinformation Governance Board.
Conservatives and other civil libertarians immediately dubbed it the Ministry of Truth.
Her self-produced “Scary Poppins” video subsequently went viral, likely doing more damage to her persona than any news network possibly could.
Jankowicz charged that the network lied about her and in the process created a threatening environment around her and damaged her career. It hardly came as a surprise as she began a crowdfunding effort in March that has tallied some $55,000 for her personal crusade.
Fox is learning that there are consequences for publicly bending over when faced with a frivolous lawsuit https://t.co/2K5FjeXBIa
— Jennifer Van Laar (@jenvanlaar) May 11, 2023
She filed her suit Wednesday in the same Delaware court where the Dominion suit was pending before the recent and enormous settlement was reached with Fox News.
Jankowicz alleged that she resigned from the disinformation board after “destructive lies” spread by the network brought harassment. She also credited the conservative network with prompting the pause of the board’s work before it was ultimately dissolved.
The complaint noted that Fox News talked about the plaintiff over 300 times in an eight-month period of 2022. It further chided hosts and commentators for, in its words, deriding and lying about Jankowicz “on repeat” and said that continues to this day.
The suit referenced the major settlement reached by Fox News recently with Dominion Voting Systems.
It slammed the network for continuing to “stay the course even as readily available information contradicted statements of fact made on Fox’s platforms. As examples, it cited “election denialism” and the defamation settlement.
The New York Times, which initially reported on Jankowicz’s lawsuit, noted that the U.S. has an intentionally high bar to reach in defamation suits. Not only must it be proven that statements were false, but they must have been made with “malice.”
Fox News must have either purposefully spread false information or callously disregarded the truth.
The network also faces a $2.7 billion suit from election equipment provider Smartmatic and another from a former producer.
