The conservative cable news channel Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by the voting machine company Dominion over baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, according to a new regulatory filing.
The settlement averts what promised to be a high-profile trial.
Newsmax and Dominion Voting Systems agreed to the settlement on Friday, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The payments will be made in three installments by January 2027, the filing said.
“We are pleased to have settled this matter,” a Dominion spokesperson said in response to a request for comment.
In a statement, Newsmax said it “believed it was critically important for the American people to hear both sides of the election disputes that arose in 2020.”
“We stand by our coverage as fair, balanced, and conducted within professional standards of journalism,” the company added in part.
No additional details were immediately available through the court records system in Delaware, where the defamation lawsuit was filed.
In a complaint filed in August 2021, Dominion accused Newsmax of having “manufactured, endorsed, repeated and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion” during and after the 2020 election.
The “outlandish and far-fetched fictions” included that Dominion “committed election fraud by rigging the 2020 Presidential Election” and “paid kickbacks to government officials,” according to the complaint.
This year, a Delaware judge ruled that Newsmax had defamed Dominion but said a jury must decide whether the conservative news brand had done so with “actual malice,” which must be proved for a public figure to succeed in a defamation case.
Newsmax previously agreed to pay $40 million to the voting technology Smartmatic to settle another election defamation lawsuit.
Newsmax is not the only conservative cable news channel that faced legal action over content aired around the 2020 election. Dominion and Fox News reached a staggering $787.5 million settlement in April 2023 hours before a trial jury was set to be sworn in.
