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Fox Corporation’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems may not have resulted in a purge of those responsible for pushing the 2020 election theories that ensnared Fox News in two major defamation suits, but a top executive has now been ushered out in a move seen internally as a direct consequence of the ill-fated Dominion legal strategy.
Viet Dinh, the chief legal officer at Fox and a close confidante of CEO Lachlan Murdoch (Dinh is the godfather of one of Murdoch’s sons), announced he was stepping down on Friday. He will exit at the end of the year but remain a “special advisor” to the company. According to an SEC filing, he will enjoy a hefty $23 million cash settlement.
Fox did not explain why Dinh was leaving the job as its top lawyer, declining to comment beyond providing cordial statements from Murdoch and Dinh expressing their mutual appreciation.
One high-level Fox News source, when asked by Mediaite why Dinh was departing, put it less diplomatically.
“He cost the company $800 million in the lawsuit with another pending,” the source said. “It’s a no brainer: you don’t settle for $800 mill and jeopardize the prized asset of Fox News without a head rolling.”
Another source close to the Murdoch camp concurred: “He screwed up and mishandled all the legal and passed [Dominion] $787 million when they should’ve settled this right away,” they said. “He hung in there for a while only because he’s Lachlan’s son’s godfather.”
Dinh oversaw Fox’s legal strategy in the Dominion case, which had evolved into an unmitigated disaster for the network by the time it settled with the voting tech company moments before the start of the trial for nearly a billion dollars. The eleventh-hour settlement, astonishing in its magnitude, baffled industry insiders who questioned why Fox ever let the case get to trial.
In the months preceding the trial, a series of devastating revelations, uncovered during the discovery process and in depositions with top Fox News hosts and executives, were spilled out into public view. The revelations included texts and emails in which top figures at Fox made clear they knew the stolen election theory being pushed by Trump and his allies in the wake of the 2020 election was indeed false.
The stunning deluge of evidence provided potent support for Dominion’s case against Fox, which needed to prove the network not only spread false information about the company, but that it did so with actual malice.
In June, a New York Times investigation into how Fox’s case fell apart laid much of the blame on Dinh, reporting that his “overly rosy” assessment of Fox’s chances in the case “informed a series of missteps and miscalculations over the next 20 months” that ultimately resulted in the biggest known defamation settlement in history.
Dinh, the Times reported, expressed confidence internally that even if Fox lost at trial, it would ultimately prevail on First Amendment grounds on appeal. That confidence led Fox to miss chances to bring an end to the case before the bloodying pretrial discovery process and ultimately cornered the company into a last-minute, high-priced settlement.
The high-level Fox News source described the Dominion strategy as “boneheaded” and “legal malpractice at the highest level that got Fox into this billion dollar debacle.”
The source also laid blame on “mismanagement at the leadership level of Fox News post election 2020” for allowing the lies to be aired that ultimately landed the network in such extreme legal peril.
Lee Levine, a veteran First Amendment attorney who has represented major media companies, including Fox, told Mediaite the Times reporting indicates Dinh erred in his assessment of the case.
“If what has been reported about the advice he gave is true, and I have no way of knowing that, it is fair to say he seriously misjudged both Fox’s likelihood of success in the case itself and the collateral damage that could be done by having to produce the internal communications, both to Dominion and then to the public,” Levine said.
“Fox’s attorneys were dealt a losing hand in the Dominion case, and overwhelmingly so,” said Dr. Joseph Russomanno, a professor and First Amendment expert. But they also “have an obligation to recognize the reality.”
“It’s been reported that Mr. Dinh had insisted that Fox was on solid legal footing. It wasn’t. If the case went to trial, losing was likely – extremely likely, according to many experts.”
Gregory Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, agreed: “Fox lacked any reason for confidence that they could prevail on their First Amendment defense, as the NYT story suggests Dinh believed. Even if the First Amendment defense was somewhat stronger than I believe, putting that much faith in it would have been a very high-risk, high-stakes gamble.”
The Dominion settlement didn’t bring an end to Fox’s legal woes related to 2020 election coverage. The network now faces two shareholder lawsuits, as well as a $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic, another voting tech company that was subjected to the same conspiracy theories as Dominion.
A former Fox News staffer said more heads should roll as a consequence of the network promoting Trump’s election lies.
“They should all be fired for misinformation,” the former staffer said. “Anyone who had a part in it.”
Disclosure: Diana Falzone worked at Fox News from 2012 to 2018. In 2017, she filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the network and settled.
