OAN and Newsmax sued for $1.6bn by Dominion for promoting election conspiracy theories

Dominion Voting Systems has filed a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against right-wing cable networks Newsmax and One America News Network along with its owners and two on-air personalities after publishing “false and manufactured stories about election fraud” during and after 2020 elections, according to the filings.

The networks “have knowingly and continuously sold the false story of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, with Dominion cast as the villain, severely injuring Dominion in the process,” Dominion legal counsel Stephen Shackelford said in a statement on 10 August.

Also named in the complaints are OAN owners Robert Herring and Charles Herring, leading election conspiracy theorist and financier Patrick Byrne, and OAN personalities Chanel Rion and Christina Bobb.

As Donald Trump and his allies promoted a baseless “stolen election” narrative and the persistent lie that the results were “rigged” against him and his supporters, the voting machine company “quickly became the focus of this downward spiral of lies, as each broadcaster attempted to outdo the others by making the lies more outrageous, spreading them further, and endorsing them as strongly as possible,” according to the filings.

Dominion targeted Mr Byrne – a former Overstock CEO and prominent financial backer for a Republican-sponsored “audit” of election results in Arizona’s Maricopa County – for “bankrolling and promoting a viral disinformation campaign about Dominion that reached millions of people worldwide.”

The lawsuits filed in Delaware and Washington DC are the company’s fifth, sixth and seventh in its attempt to combat far-right conspiracy theories and “a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies” about the company that the networks “manufactured, endorsed, repeated, and broadcast,” the complaints allege.

The company has previously filed defamation lawsuits against attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, and Fox News. They have moved to dismiss those lawsuits.

Newsmax had previously sought to distance itself from statements and segments that promoted baseless fraud claims by airing disclaimers or, after settling another suit from Dominion executive Eric Coomer, admitting that the network’s claims about Dominion were false.

The lawsuits filed on Tuesday point to repeated statements from network hosts to suggest Dominion rigged the results of the 2020 presidential election and used a company in Venezuela to rig elections for the late Hugo Chavez, among other false claims that fuelled an attack at the US Capitol on 6 January as well as ongoing attempts among GOP lawmakers to undermine US elections.

In a statement, Newsmax claimed that the network “simply reported on allegations made by well-known public figures, including the president, his advisors and members of Congress – Dominion’s action today is a clear attempt to squelch such reporting and undermine a free press.”

The Independent has also requested comment from OAN and Mr Byrne.