Fox News Channel is displayed on a building near the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Fox has won two major legal victories in 24 hours.
PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images/AFP
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PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images/AFP
Legally, it’s been a good 24 hours for Fox News.
Hours after President Biden announced Sunday that he was withdrawing from his 2024 reelection bid, Hunter Biden dropped his lawsuit against Fox News for broadcasting salacious footage of his private misconduct taken from his personal laptop.
On Monday, a federal judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by a former Biden administration official, finding that Jankowicz’s claims cited statements that were often broadly accurate or fell into the categories of opinions or statements that could not be refuted.
“This is a politically motivated lawsuit aimed at silencing free speech and we are pleased with the court’s decision to protect the First Amendment,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement. Jankowicz’s lawyers said they would appeal the decision.
A sham trial for the president’s son
In the case of Hunter Biden, the explicit images were incorporated into a six-part series that first aired in 2022 on his streaming service, Fox Nation. The series featured a mock trial of the younger Biden over his overseas business dealings.
Hunter Biden was convicted last month of criminal gun charges and will face a tax trial in September.
The Fox Nation series remained available until earlier this year, when Hunter Biden went public with his threat to sue the network over footage that showed him using crack cocaine and having sex with prostitutes.
The network pulled the series as a “precautionary measure,” according to a spokesperson. Fox has nonetheless staunchly defended its coverage, explicitly noting when filing the lawsuit earlier this month that Hunter Biden is a public figure and a convicted felon.
“Consistent with the First Amendment, Fox News has accurately covered newsworthy events created by Mr. Biden himself,” the network said in a statement. Fox referred to its previous comment after Biden dropped the lawsuit. Biden’s attorney did not respond to NPR’s request for comment from his client.
Biden would have had a hard time suing for defamation, given the prominence of his family, the repeated reminders throughout Fox’s mock trial that the proceedings were not real, and Biden’s real and notable legal troubles.
Biden instead filed suit under New York state revenge porn laws, which make it illegal to distribute sexually explicit images or videos without the consent of the individuals depicted or to “harass, annoy or alarm” the subjects of such material by posting or threatening to post it.
In April, Biden’s lawyers said they had privately pressured Fox to retract stories and segments promoting unsubstantiated allegations that he helped funnel millions of dollars in bribes to his father, the president, from Ukrainian interests. Fox stars have made such allegations hundreds of times, according to the liberal watchdog group Media Matters.
Alexander Smirnov, one of the primary sources of the allegations, admitted that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in spreading the allegations. He is now facing federal charges that he lied to the FBI about the same allegations. Fox said it covered the development in subsequent reports.
President Biden announced his decision to withdraw from the 2024 White House race on Sunday afternoon. Hunter Biden praised his father in a public statement for providing “unconditional love … as president and as a parent.” Hours later, according to court documents, the younger Biden filed papers to withdraw his complaint.
Judge dismisses disinformation expert’s complaint
In Jankowicz’s case, U.S. District Court Judge Colm F. Connolly dismissed all elements of his defamation claim against Fox. Jankowicz is an academic who studies disinformation, democracy and free speech.
In spring 2022, the Biden administration appointed her to head the new Disinformation Governance Council within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Just three weeks into her tenure, Jankowicz resigned, saying she had received death threats and had been ordered to leave her home by a private security consultant. The council was disbanded.
In her complaint, Jankowicz claimed that Fox falsely misled viewers into believing that she intended to collude with major social media companies to censor American’s online speech, that she had been fired rather than leaving voluntarily, and that she wanted to “give verified Twitter users the power to edit each other’s tweets” — an accusation based on a manipulated video segment. (She had supported a reform that closely resembles the “community notes” feature that allows users to add context, which Elon Musk has embraced since taking control of Twitter and rebranding it X.)
At the time Jankowicz filed his lawsuit, legal experts told NPR that it was an overreach: The bar for winning defamation cases is raised dramatically for public officials, because free speech traditions seek to give Americans considerable leeway to criticize people in powerful government positions.
Justice Connolly found that several of the defamatory statements about Fox were true. For the defamatory allegations to stand, the statements would have had to be found to be harmful and false. (Furthermore, Fox would have had to know, or have reason to know, that they were false.)
He cited dictionary entries to say that the statements about Fox encompassed fair descriptions according to commonly understood definitions of the terms in question. And he rejected Jankowicz’s citation of times when commentators referred to the disinformation panel without naming her, even though her image was on screen.
Fox welcomed the decision by Connolly, who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump and had the support of Delaware’s two senators, both Democrats. In recent years, Fox has been mired in unwanted surveillance and legal challenges over what it has aired on various political topics — largely aiding Trump’s interests.
A year ago, Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit stemming from its amplifying of false claims that a voting machine company helped rig the 2020 election in favor of President Biden. It is facing a multibillion-dollar lawsuit from a second voting technology company on the same grounds, though the network says it hopes to prevail. In 2020, Fox News paid millions to the parents of slain Democratic Party staffer Seth Rich to settle their lawsuit over the network’s since-retracted reporting on him.
