Sidney Powell by Dominion and Smartmatic
MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
Dominion was the first to snap.
On January 8, 2021, it filed a defamation suit against pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell, seeking $1.3 billion in damages.
Powell was one of the faces of the Trump campaign’s legal team in November, but Trump kicked her off the team after she floated her conspiracy theory at a press conference.
Despite being purged from Trump’s “Elite Strike Force” legal team Powell used her false theories as the premise of four federal lawsuits seeking to overturn the election result. All of them failed, and some have resulted in motions for her to be disbarred.
The falsehoods from Powell and Rudy Giuliani, another conspiracy theorist attorney hired by Trump to challenge his election loss, formed the basis for Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox. Dominion claimed Fox defamed the company when hosts brought Powell and Giuliani as on-air guests and either endorsed their claims or didn’t sufficiently challenge them.
Dominion’s lawsuit alleges against Powell claimed she caused the company business losses after she baselessly accused the company of fraud, election rigging, and bribery.
“Powell’s statements were calculated to — and did in fact — provoke outrage and cause Dominion enormous harm,” Tom Clare, the attorney representing Dominion, wrote in the lawsuit.
The 124-page defamation lawsuit also outlines how Powell raised money from her media tour peddling her conspiracy theory through a corporate vehicle called “Defending the Republic,” also named as a party in the lawsuit.
Powell responded by tweeting that the lawsuit “is baseless & filed to harass, intimidate, & to drain our resources as we seek the truth of #DominionVotingSystems‘ role in this fraudulent election.”
The lawsuit remains pending.
Smartmatic filed a defamation lawsuit against Powell a month after Dominion did, suing her at the same time it sued Rudy Giuliani, a fellow conspiracy theorist, and Fox News. The company asked for $2.7 billion in damages.
The company claimed that Powell and Giuliani used right-wing media outlets like Fox News to make their conspiracy theories go viral.
“These defendants are primary sources of much of the false information,” the company said. “Their unfounded accusations were repeated by other media outlets, journalists, bloggers and influencers the world over.”
Smartmatic’s case against Powell was spun off into their own lawsuit, for jurisdictional reasons, and is progressing through federal court in Washington, DC.
The discovery in Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News could prove highly damaging for Powell. Emails showed that Powell’s claims of election fraud relied in part on someone claiming to be a time-traveling headless ghost.