lawsuits

Suzanne Scott remade Fox News Media into a lucrative consumer brand. But a $1.6 billion defamation suit against the company is testing her strategy and leadership.

The verdict is the second big judgment against the Infowars host over his relentless promotion of the lie that the 2012 massacre never happened, and that the grieving families seen in news coverage were actors hired as part of a plot to take away people’s guns.

The Pac-12 Network has filed a civil lawsuit against satellite and streaming company Dish Network, claiming the pay television service withheld payment during the COVID-19 pandemic in violation of its carriage agreement. According to the lawsuit, Pac-12 Network says the agreement requires it to provide a certain number of college football games during a season. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pac-12 Network only aired one game; as a consequence, the network says it offered Dish a rebate because that year’s football season was shortened.

Donald Trump says he plans to file lawsuits against “a large number” of news outlets, just as he has against CNN. In an email to supporters, the former president said those other news outlets — he did not identify them — were guilty of “lies, defamation, and wrongdoing,” including as it pertains to “The Big Lie.”

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., focuses primarily on the term “The Big Lie” about Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud that he says cost him the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.

The dogfight between Judith Sheindlin and CBS with Rebel Entertainment Partners over the $95 million sale of the Judy Judy library is over, but not finished. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kristin S. Escalante has granted a motion by Sheindlin, Big Ticket Pictures and the Paramount Global-owned company to dismiss the two-year old suit from self-described “successor in interest” Rebel over the more than $5 million the latter claims it is owed for the admittedly convoluted 2017 sale. However, Rebel says it intends to appeal.

Warner Bros. Discovery and its top corporate brass are facing a shareholder lawsuit that alleges false statements were made about the health of the HBO Max streaming service and its subscriber numbers to pave the way for a merger this year. The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed last week in New York federal court by the Collinsville (Ill.) Police Pension Board, which held Discovery stock. The suit proposes to expand to include other Discovery shareholders who have watched the value of their holdings plummet after the $43-billion merger of Discovery and AT&T’s WarnerMedia unit.

A Federal Court judge in Los Angeles denied a motion to dismiss the $10 billion racial discrimination suit brought against McDonald’s by Byron Allen’s companies including Entertainment Studios. The suit, originally filed last May, alleges that McDonald’s discriminates against media companies that are owned by and serve minorities. It contends that McDonald’s spends less than $5 million a year on African-American-owned media and has shown a pattern of stereotyping and refusing to do business.

As McDonald’s and Nielsen lawsuits proceed, Allen says spending on Black-owned media isn’t rising fast enough.

A number of top Fox News hosts and staffers are among the individuals who are slated to be deposed as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ ongoing defamation lawsuit against the cable giant.

Facebook will pay $37.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company collected users’ IP addresses, which offer general information about location, in violation of a prior privacy policy. The company, now named Meta Platforms, disclosed in June that it had agreed to settle the litigation, but the terms weren’t made public until Monday. The settlement agreement specifies that Facebook does not admit to doing anything wrong.

The suit, filed by Dominion Voting Systems, could be one of the most consequential First Amendment cases in a generation.

Former President Donald Trump, whose allegations, without evidence, that the 2020 election was rigged helped fuel the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, has signaled he plans to sue CNN for its “fake news.” But given that the news came in the form of one of innumerable fundraising emails from the President and his as-of-yet non-campaign, it could be yet another effort to raise money for a possible 2024 run. “I have notified CNN of my intent to file a lawsuit.” Trump said, citing its “repeated defamatory statements against me.”

Twitter had asked for an expedited trial in September, while Musk’s team called for waiting until early next year because of the complexity of the case. Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, the head judge of Delaware’s Court of Chancery, which handles many high-profile business disputes. said Musk’s team underestimated the Delaware court’s ability to “quickly process complex litigation.”

A writer and actress named Christine Davis claims the Emmy-nominated series copies the premise of her show This School Year.

Twitter’s lawsuit opens with a sharply-worded accusation: “Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.” As part of the April deal, Musk and Twitter had agreed to pay each other a $1 billion breakup fee if either was responsible for the deal falling through. The company could have pushed Musk to pay the hefty fee but is going farther than that, trying to force him to complete the full $44 billion purchase approved by the company’s board.

Former Attorney General William Barr has been issued a subpoena in connection with Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News, court records show. A filing made in Delaware Superior Court and dated July 8 indicated Barr had been sent a subpoena as Dominion works to prove Fox knowingly aired false information about the company following the 2020 election.

A Delaware judge on Tuesday rejected a motion by the parent of Fox News Channel to dismiss Dominion Voting Systems Inc.’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit over the network’s 2020 presidential election coverage. Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis, who last December said Dominion could sue Fox News Channel, said the voting machine company can also sue Fox Corp. on a theory it was directly liable for statements on the network.

Meta Platforms Inc. was sued Friday over claims that private medical data is being shared secretly with Facebook when patients access web portals for some health-care providers. Facebook’s Pixel tracking tool redirects patient communications and other supposedly “secure” information without authorization and in violation of federal and state laws, according to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court as a proposed class action on behalf of millions of patients.

Meta this week was hit with several lawsuits claiming that it designed Facebook and Instagram in a way that posed a risk to the health of young users. The cases, filed in nine states, all essentially claim that Facebook and Instagram designed their services to be addictive, and served potentially harmful content to teens and children.

A group of Netflix investors have filed suit against the streaming company in a San Francisco federal court, alleging that from October to April, Netflix failed to disclose “adverse material facts” about its true growth prospects. The class-action complaint names Co-CEOs Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, as well as Chief Financial Officer Spencer Neumann.

SportsCenter co-anchor Sage Steele has sued ESPN and corporate parent The Walt Disney Co. for allegedly violating both her contract and her free speech rights, according to multiple reports. Steele is reportedly claiming that the network “sidelined” her last year after she made remarks about ESPN’s COVID policy and former President Barack Obama’s ethnic identity.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Atlanta says Leakes, who is Black, complained to executives about years of racist remarks from fellow housewife Kim Zolciak-Biermann, who is White, but that only Leakes suffered consequences. It names as defendants NBCUniversal, Bravo, production companies True Entertainment and Truly Original, executives from the companies and Housewives executive producer Andy Cohen, but not Zolciak-Biermann.

CBS shareholders have reached a $14.75 million settlement in their securities lawsuit against Leslie Moonves and the network regarding how it dealt with the sexual misconduct allegations against the disgraced former chairman-CEO and how his previous #MeToo comments affected the company’s financial performance.

Facebook parent Meta is urging a federal appellate court to intervene in a lawsuit brought by advertisers suing the company over allegedly inflated metrics. In papers filed this week with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Facebook seeks permission to immediately appeal U.S. District Court Judge James Donato’s decision granting class-action status to the companies DZ Reserve (an e-commerce store operator) and Max Martialis (which sells weapons accessories).