Dominion ballot counting company is personally suing two OAN on-air reporters over election ‘lies’ in $1.6bn suit

Dominion Voting Systems is suing One America News Network for more than $1.6 billion in damages – which it accuses of defamation for pushing conspiracy theories around the 2020 presidential election.

On Tuesday, the company sued the far-right organisation after allegedly engaging “in a race to the bottom with Fox and other outlets such as Newsmax to spread false and manufactured stories about election fraud.”

The lawsuit said, “Dominion quickly became the focus of this downward spiral of lies, as each broadcaster attempted to outdo the others by making the lies more outrageous, spreading them further, and endorsing them as strongly as possible.”

They added that the theories were “verifiably false” and were detrimental to Dominion’s reputation.

They seek at least $1 billion in “lost enterprise value”, $600 million for lost profits, $700,000 for “expenses incurred combatting the disinformation campaign”, and $600,000 for security expenses.

OAN hosts Chanel Rion and Christina Bobb have also been accused of amplifying the false narratives about Dominion – after presenting Rion “as an in-house spokesperson for all Dominion-related content.”

According to the lawsuit, Rion was responsible for “an entire line of programming exclusively devoted to defaming Dominion, descriptively named ‘Dominion-izing the Vote,’ which branded OAN’s disinformation and defamation campaign against Dominion into a single catchy phrase that is now synonymous with fraudulently flipping votes.”

Dominion Voting Systems have filed a series of lawsuits against people and organisations that pushed false theories with claims it manipulated the results of the 2020 election – which has caused lasting damage to US democracy.

People took to Twitter on the matter.