A Delaware judge has tossed out a disinformation expert’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News, concluding that she either had failed to show that the statements at issue were false or that they were matters of opinion.
Nina Jankowicz was the former executive director of a Department of Homeland Security division tasked with monitoring the threat of disinformation. Last year, she sued the network and parent Fox Corp. in Delaware Superior Court, claiming that the network conducted a “malicious campaign of destruction” against her.
Her lawsuit alleged that the network falsely claimed that she was trying to censor Americans’ speech, that she was fired from her position at the federal government, and that she wanted to give verified Twitter users, including herself, the power to edit others’ tweets.
But Colm F. Connolly, chief judge of U.S. District Court in Delaware, tossed out 36 statements that Jankowicz cited in her claim, ruling that it is “not disputed that those statements are not ‘of and concerning the plaintiff,’ and instead were directed at the division board, DHS or the Biden administration.
The remaining statement had to do with Fox News host Sean Hannity‘s use of her image in a segment in which he said that “the Board was a ‘department … dedicated to working with the special media giants for the purpose of policing information.”
Connolly, though, ruled that the statement was “not defamatory because it is not false.”
He cited the charter of the Disinformation Board, including that it would serve as “internal and external point of contact for coordination with … the private sector[] and non-governmental actors regarding MDM.”
“In other words, the Board was formed precisely to police information and to work with non governmental actors (such as ‘media giants’) to accomplish that purpose,” the judge wrote.
Read the judge’s dismissal of the disinformation expert’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News.
Jankowicz alleged that she resigned from the board as a result of harassment following Fox News personalities’ attacks on her role. The board was disbanded in 2022 amid Republican backlash.
The judge, though, sided with Fox in ruling that the statements were matters of opinion, which are not actionable as a defamation claim.
In one instance, she had claimed that the statements were “calculated to lead consumers to believe that Jankowicz intended to censor Americans’ speech.” She had argued that the board did not have “operational authority” to do so.
The judge, though, wrote that “censorship” can be understood to be more than just “operational authority.”
“For many if not most American citizens, the identification of their speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ or ‘malinformation’ by a government entity authorized to ‘coordinat[e]’ with ‘the private sector’ ‘regarding’ that labeling would be viewed as an effort to discourage people from engaging in that speech,” the judge wrote.
Jankowicz’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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