Smartmatic, the voting technology company at the center of a defamation suit against Fox News, accused the network of destroying key evidence. In court filings unsealed the week of May 12, Smartmatic alleged that top Fox executives, including Fox News co-founder Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, intentionally deleted text messages after the 2020 election.
“Fox orchestrated the destruction of text messages across all levels of their corporate hierarchy…despite a clear duty to preserve evidence,” Smartmatic’s attorneys wrote in the filing, which was reviewed by several news outlets.
Allegations of deleted text evidence
The allegedly deleted texts date back to November and December 2020. It was during this time period that Smartmatic accused Fox News of claiming the presidential election could have been rigged in its coverage of Smartmatic’s machines. At that time, Rupert Murdoch was the chairman of Fox Corporation and Lachlan Murdoch served as CEO. Rupert Murdoch stepped down in 2023, passing the chairmanship to Lachlan Murdoch.
According to Smartmatic’s filings, the deletions were not accidental. The company described the actions as “extensive and willful,” and added that “Fox has eliminated contemporaneous texts that would have revealed further evidence of what Fox executives knew about the falsity of their broadcasts.”
Smartmatic asked the judge to instruct the jury that Fox destroyed evidence, allowing jurors to assume the missing materials would have undermined Fox’s defense.
Fox News rejects accusations
A spokesperson for Fox News said Smartmatic’s claims are “a desperate attempt to distract” from a recent evidentiary ruling that favored the network, according to a statement obtained by CNN.
“Smartmatic weakly attempts to resurrect stale, baseless discovery issues that actually were disclosed by Fox and resolved two years ago,” the spokesperson said. “These issues have no bearing on the merits of Smartmatic’s case, which has fallen apart at every turn.”
Fox portrayed Smartmatic as a struggling company using litigation to salvage its business in court filings. The network said the lawsuit is “a litigation lottery ticket,” and dismissed the billions in damages sought by Smartmatic as unfounded, according to filings obtained by The Washington Post.
Lawyers for the network argued that Smartmatic’s reputation was already “tarnished by its controversial foreign dealings,” pointing specifically to a federal bribery and money laundering indictment involving Smartmatic executives related to elections in the Philippines.
This week, an appeals court granted Fox access to discovery tied to that indictment. It’s a decision Fox sees as a significant legal win. Smartmatic denied wrongdoing in the case and the executives involved pleaded not guilty.
New filings reveal Smartmatic’s plan
The new filings also offered a glimpse into Smartmatic’s broader strategy: alleging that Fox knowingly broadcast false information to recover conservative viewers who abandoned the network during its coverage of the 2020 election.
“From the Murdochs to the producers, dozens of Fox personnel knew the Fraud Lie and Other Lies were false,” Smartmatic attorneys wrote. “Yet not one person with authority stepped forward to stop the deliberate spread of disinformation. This was not one rogue show. It was a calculated corporate decision to prioritize viewership over accuracy.”
In internal communications, Smartmatic alleged that Fox employees privately rejected the claims they were airing, but on screen, anchors like Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro gave airtime to conspiracy theories that accused Smartmatic of being involved in election fraud.
In response, Fox argued its hosts and production teams believed the president’s claims were at least plausible, and that covering statements made by Trump’s legal team was constitutionally protected.
“The evidence uniformly shows that the hosts and their teams subjectively believed the President’s claims were plausible and that is all that matters,” the network wrote.
Fox News said it emphasized a diversity of viewpoints in its coverage and added that the hosts were presenting newsworthy allegations, not definitive conclusions.
“Eleven million pages of discovery and over one hundred depositions have shown this lawsuit to be nothing more than a ploy to resuscitate an already failing company,” the network’s lawyers wrote in court filings.
The lawsuit, first filed in February 2021, continues to move through the New York State Supreme Court. A trial date has not been set, though proceedings could begin next year. There is a possibility the case could end in a settlement just as Fox did in a similar defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems in 2023 for $787.5 million. A settlement would spare high-profile witnesses such as Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch from testifying.
