Like a lot of people on Tuesday, Jimmy Kimmel was very disappointed that the defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News ended in a settlement. But the ABC host didn’t just call out Fox News; he also dinged Dominion for abandoning the high-minded justifications it insisted were behind the lawsuit.
“They took the money instead,” Kimmel declared, adding later that “[Fox] can go right back to sodomizing the country, while Dominion and their lawyers go shopping for yachts, I guess.”
For those catching up, Dominion sued Fox News for defamation because the network, as part of its larger efforts to platform former president Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, allowed its on-air talent and many guests to spread lies that Dominion somehow helped rig the election for president Joe Biden, doing tremendous damage to Dominion’s business.
They had what was widely considered to be a very strong case. In addition to the fact the election wasn’t actually stolen, during the discovery phase of the trial, a mountain of evidence was unearthed that essentially proved Fox knew good and well that they were spotlighting anchors and commentators who were lying and continued to air them anyway. Fox even broke the law by withholding evidence during discovery.
But on Tuesday, the jury trial that was scheduled to begin instead was canceled when Fox and Dominion announced a settlement. Fox has agreed to pay Dominion $787 million, about 4% of the company’s current total net worth. In addition, Fox isn’t required to admit wrongdoing or even apologize. And that brings us back to Kimmel.
“No company in America had a worse day than Fox News today,” Kimmel said during his monologue. “That big, $1.6 billion defamation trial was supposed to get going today. But it ended when Fox settled for $787.5 million. It’s gonna take a lot of reverse-mortgage ads to pay that one off.”
“Immediately after the settlement, Fox issued a statement that said, ‘This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.’ They’re already lying in their statement about lying,” Kimmel said. “It’s shameless.”
And then he turned his gaze to Dominion.
“And while obviously Fox is the main villain here, I also want to say, ‘nice going’ to Dominion. We naively thought this was about making Fox News take responsibility for destroying their reputation. Because that’s what you told us it was about,” Kimmel said. “But no, they took the money instead. Which means the liars who knowingly misled their oatmeal-brained viewers, and seriously damaged our Democracy, don’t have to say anything about it at all. No apologies. No testimony.”
Watch Kimmel’s full monologue in the video above.
