Fox boss Rupert Murdoch warned he’ll have to take stand in $1.6B Dominion defamation suit

Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch will reportedly have to take the stand as early as Monday in the blockbuster $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by voting machine-maker Dominion.

As jury selection was set to start on Thursday, Bloomberg News reported Murdoch will be called as the first or second witness in the suit accusing Fox News of repeatedly spewing lies that the company’s machines were rigged to help defeat former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

The judge presiding over the case had already said the 92-year-old should expect to be called to testify after Murdoch said in a deposition that he knew the claims were false but allowed them to continue.

The revelation came on a day of damaging and rapid-fire developments in the high-profile case.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis angrily told Fox lawyers he will likely order an independent review to determine whether the network improperly withheld evidence, a step that could lead to undetermined sanctions.

“I need people to tell me the truth,” Davis said. “And by the way, omission is a lie.”

Fox only recently turned over recordings of host Maria Bartiromo talking with Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, former lawyers for Trump. The recordings suggest that Bartiromo knew the claims Giuliani planned to make on the air were baseless.

A Dominion’s attorney questioned whether there may be other evidence that Fox failed to turn over.

“What I don’t know is, are there more recordings?” Brooks asked Davis.

Fox lawyers had also withheld critical information about the role Murdoch played at Fox News, until recent days.

Dominion says Fox did untold damage to its business by repeatedly airing false allegations that its machines and the software they used rigged the 2020 presidential election to prevent Trump’s re-election.

Davis has already ruled it is “CRYSTAL clear” to him that those claims were false, although a jury will decide if the network aired the claims with “actual malice” towards Dominion, a very high legal standard.

Fox lawyers hoped to shield Murdoch and his son, Lachlan, from being forced to testify, claiming they play no day-to-day role at Fox News, which is a subsidiary of Fox Corp.

But Rupert Murdoch himself undermined that claim by admitting that he could’ve ordered Fox News chiefs to keep the lies about Dominion off the air.