Defamation

Fox News media columnist Howard Kurtz revealed Sunday that the network is not allowing him to cover a defamation lawsuit against Fox filed by Dominion Voting Systems.

The country’s most-watched cable news network is facing considerable jeopardy from the suit, with Dominion asking for $1.6 billion in damages. Fox is accused of knowingly broadcasting false information about Dominion machines in order to promote claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Trump.

Fox News’ Sean Hannity may have uncritically elevated baseless conspiracy theories about widespread fraud committed by voting machine suppliers in the 2020 election — even though he didn’t think they were true.

That’s the latest revelation out of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, which is slated to go to trial in April in a Delaware court.

Amber Heard has settled the defamation lawsuit with her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, according to a statement posted on her verified Instagram account.

Heard said she has “made no admission” and that the settlement is “not an act of concession.” She pointed to her experience with the American legal system as part of her motivation for deciding to settle the case, alleging that “abundant, direct evidence that corroborated [her] testimony was excluded” and that “popularity and power mattered more than reason and due process.”

Amber Heard has settled her defamation case against ex-husband Johnny Depp, she announced in an Instagram post on Monday.

Heard, 36, called the decision to settle with Depp, 59, "very difficult" adding that it followed "a great deal of deliberation."

"It’s important for me to say that I never chose this. I defended my truth and in doing so my life as a I knew it was destroyed. The vilification I have faced on social media is an amplified version of the ways in which women are re-victimised when they come forward," Heard wrote.

Far-right talk show host Alex Jones is seeking a new trial after a Connecticut jury decided this month he should pay $965 million in compensatory damages to eight families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims and one first responder.

After the 2012 massacre in which 26 people were killed, Jones has baselessly and repeatedly claimed the incident was staged and the families and first responders were “crisis actors.”

Try to imagine having a young child die in a horrific mass shooting. Now, imagine spending a decade being attacked and mocked by a mob of nutjobs who claim your child never even existed. These people show up at your home, demanding to see your now-murdered child. Some even go so far as to make rape threats and desecrate your baby’s grave.

All of these things happened in real life. And responsibility for all of those horrors that came after the massacre can be attributed to the repeated actions of one man: Alex Jones.

In this country, there are only so many ways to deal with a man like Alex Jones.

On Wednesday, a jury in Connecticut tried its best to force the Infowars host and owner to face consequences for the hurt that his lies have caused others, ordering Jones to pay $965 million to relatives of victims of a 2012 mass shooting and an FBI agent he accused of all being actors.

In an interview with “PBS NewsHour,” trial lawyer Jesse Gessin described the nearly $1 billion judgment as “probably one of the largest defamation verdicts in U.S. history.”

James Madison never met Alex Jones. This side of heaven, we'll never know whether the author of the First Amendment would've listened to Jones' outlandish radio show. But Jones now knows that James Madison's hand-crafted First Amendment umbrella protects most—though not all—speech. On Wednesday, a jury awarded the parents of the deadly Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting $1 billion in damages; Jones had called the shooting a hoax and the parents crisis actors. The verdict followed a smaller but just as significant Texas jury verdict against Jones' lies about Sandy Hook.

A Connecticut jury awarded nearly $1 billion in damages to 15 plaintiffs defamed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones when the Infowars host called the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting a hoax staged by actors following a script written by the government to build support for gun control.

With the plaintiffs sobbing in the gallery, the clerk read out the verdict in which the jury decided compensatory damages for both slander and for emotional distress.

A Connecticut jury ordered Alex Jones to pay nearly $1 billion to families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting for spreading lies about the massacre. 

Six adults and 20 children were killed during the shooting in December 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, just 20 miles away from where victims' families gave tearful testimony in Waterbury Superior Court during the trial.