If you own a device connected to the Internet, then you know that on Tuesday Dominion Voting Systems and Fox Corp. agreed to a $787.5 million settlement of Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox relating to Fox News’s coverage of the 2020 Presidential election and its aftermath. The settlement doesn’t mean the end of related litigation, however; there is, for example, the separate lawsuit that voting-machine company Smartmatic brought against Fox Corp. in New York state court that remains pending. There are a host of other lawsuits that Dominion is pursuing related the 2020 Presidential election conspiracy theories, including, for example, lawsuits against Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive, and news outlets such as Newsmax.
And then there is the derivative lawsuit that a Fox Corp. shareholder filed in Delaware Chancery Court last week against Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and four other Fox executives, in which the plaintiff alleges that the defendants breached their fiduciary duties by permitting the company’s news subsidiary to make false reports about the 2020 presidential election in order to avoid losing viewers. The shareholder suit, in and of itself, presents some interesting issues, but in light of Tuesday’s settlement in the Dominion lawsuit, and the threatening prospects of the additional litigation still pending against Fox Corp., the shareholder lawsuit may now be even more interesting.Continue Reading The Derivative Suit Against the Fox Board Just Got a Lot More Interesting