Fox News has won its second defamation ruling in as many days after a federal judge in Delaware on Wednesday dismissed a former Trump supporter’s claim that ex-host Tucker Carlson acted with “actual malice” when he said he was a government provocateur during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The suit was brought in July 2023 by Ray Epps after Carlson had made him the target of one of his conspiracy theories. Months later, though, Epps was charged, effectively putting to rest that unfounded notion. Epps would go on to plead guilty to the misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct on restricted grounds and was given probation.
Despite what Carlson said about Epps, defamation cases are difficult to win. Judge Jennifer Hall acknowledged that though Carlson may have “engaged in subpar journalism,” it didn’t reach the standard of acting with malicious intent, according to The New York Times.
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As further evidence of Epps‘ uphill battle, Fox’s lawyers once successfully defended Carlson in a slander case by arguing that viewers shouldn’t take him literally.
The right-wing network approved Wednesday’s development, alluding to a pair of its other legal wins recently.
“Following the dismissals of the Jankowicz, Bobulinski, and now Epps cases, FOX News is pleased with these back-to-back decisions from federal courts preserving the press freedoms of the First Amendment,” a spokesperson told the Daily Beast.
On Tuesday, a New York judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit against host Jessica Tarlov by one of House Republicans' witnesses in its ill-fated Biden impeachment effort.
And over the summer, another defamation suit was dismissed. That one was filed by Nina Jankowicz, the former head of the Biden administration’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security. Jankowicz alleged that the network “repeatedly force-fed lies about me to tens of millions of their viewers,” resulting in violent threats and harassment.
Fox, which settled a defamation suit last April with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million, still faces a $2.7 billion defamation suit by voting technology company Smartmatic.
