Dominion Voting Systems has filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani for pushing a “Big Lie” about their machines flipping votes from Trump to President Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election.
The company claims that “the harm to Dominion’s business and reputation is unprecedented and irreparable because of how fervently millions of people believe it.”
“Just as Giuliani and his allies intended, the Big Lie went viral on social media as people tweeted, retweeted, and raged that Dominion had stolen their votes,” lawyers for the company said in the lawsuit filed on Monday.
Dominion cited in its lawsuit more than 50 statements Giuliani has made wrongly alleging fraud against the company — including accusations he’s made on Twitter, and during media appearances and legal hearings.
The company’s lawyers also noted that Giuliani had continued to peddle lies about their machines while speaking to a crowd of Trump loyalists shortly before they breached the U.S. Capitol building to stop the certification of the Electoral College on January 6.
Dominion’s lawsuit against Giuliani is the second case the company has filed against Trump-aligned lawyers in recent weeks. Previously, the company also filed a suit against lawyer Sidney Powell, who has pushed the same debunked claims about election fraud against Dominion since Trump lost the election. The lawsuit against Powell is seeking similar damages — around $1.3 billion — and was filed just shortly after the Capitol breach occurred.
Like Giuliani, Powell’s accusations were baseless, and oftentimes went into bizarre territory. She alleged, for example, that deceased Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez was involved with the CIA and the Chinese Communist Party to rig the Dominion voting machines against Trump. Several judges have ruled against Powell’s accusations when they were presented in courtrooms across the country.
Trump himself has promoted false claims against Dominion. On December 16, for instance, he suggested in a tweet that the company’s voting machines “shifted 2-3% of Trump Votes to Biden,” based on now-deleted reporting from One America News Network (OANN).
OANN, perhaps expecting legal action from the company, quietly removed several articles on its website last week that mentioned Dominion Voting Systems and the false allegations of election fraud related to its machines.
Dominion has not ruled out the possibility of filing more defamation lawsuits against other individuals who falsely implicated their machines in voter fraud, including Trump.
“We are looking very deliberately at the statements and actions of everyone who has been involved in talking about Dominion,” company lawyer Thomas Clare said earlier this month.
Millions of Americans — mostly Republican-leaning voters — falsely believe that voter fraud altered the outcome of last year’s election. Among all respondents taking part in an Economist/YouGov poll conducted from January 16-19, 65 percent said Biden was the legitimate winner in November’s race, while only 35 percent said he wasn’t. However, among GOP respondents in the poll, only 33 percent said Biden won legitimately, while 67 percent said he did not.
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