A former Marine who voted for Donald Trump and joined the Jan. 6, 2021, protests sued Fox News over broadcasts that claimed he was a federal agent planted in the crowd to start an insurrection that would make the outgoing president look bad.
(Bloomberg) — A former Marine who voted for Donald Trump and joined the Jan. 6, 2021, protests sued Fox News over broadcasts that claimed he was a federal agent planted in the crowd to start an insurrection that would make the outgoing president look bad.
The suit by Ray Epps, filed Tuesday in Delaware, says the reports forced him and his wife to hire private security after he received death threats and bullet casings were found in their yard.
It’s the latest fallout from Fox’s amplification of conspiracy theories in the weeks after the 2020 election, including false claims that two voting machine firms conspired to flip millions of votes away from Trump. Fox paid one of the companies, Dominion Voting Systems Inc., $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit. The other company, Smartmatic Corp., has a $2.7 billion suit pending.
Fox News didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment. The suit is seeking unspecified damages.
Epps, who says he believed the stolen-election claims broadcast by Fox News at the time, now says the network lied to him and other viewers and then threw him under the bus by allowing on-air personalities like former network star Tucker Carlson to spread “false and unfounded lies” about him. Epps alleges that video of him talking to protesters was taken wildly out of context to suggest he was encouraging others to enter the Capitol. He didn’t enter the Capitol and isn’t among the roughly 1,000 people who were charged with wrongdoing that day.
Read More: Fox’s $787.5 Million Settlement Doesn’t End Its 2020 Liability
Carlson, who anchored the most-watched show for the news network before he was fired in April, devoted more than two dozen segments to Epps, according to the complaint. Carlson told viewers that Epps was “the central figure” in the riot and “helped stage-manage the insurrection,” the suit says.
“Just as Fox had focused on voting machine companies when falsely claiming a rigged election, Fox knew it needed a scapegoat for January 6th that would help absolve itself and would appeal to its viewers,” according to the complaint. “It settled on Ray Epps and began promoting the lie that Epps was a federal agent who incited the attack on the Capitol.”
Fox has been in a public tussle with Carlson after the Dominion settlement. While Carlson’s contract precludes him from hosting another show for another year, he’s been running a version of his former broadcast on Twitter, at times taking shots at Fox and its management.
The company has been looking to move beyond the criticism of its 2020 election coverage and will debut a new prime-time line up starting on Monday.
Baked Alaska
Epps became embroiled in the conspiracy theory after a popular right-wing social-media personality who goes by the name Baked Alaska live-streamed Epps during a protest in Washington the day before the insurrection. Epps said he confronted other protesters about their apparent desire for violence and said he encouraged them to be peaceful. Epps told the others protesters that we was planning to go to the Capitol the next day “peacefully.”
“At that time, Epps believed that the Rotunda was open to the public, like it had been when he visited Washington, DC with his father a decade earlier,” according to the suit. “Nevertheless, Baked Alaska responded by chanting ‘Fed, fed, fed,’ which a few others in the crowd joined.”
According to the conspiracy theory, the fact that Epps wasn’t charged after the riot is evidence that federal investigators are protecting him.
On Jan. 6, at the Capitol grounds, Epps said he tried to “diffuse the situation,” including by discouraging a rioter who was later charged. He said he was “shocked and disappointed” when he later saw people climbing the walls and scaffolding of the Capitol. The video clips of Epps on and before Jan. 6 fueled the conspiracy theory.
Epps was later interviewed under oath by the House committee probing the insurrection, which later put out a statement saying he was not a federal agent.
The case is Epps v. Fox News Network LLC, N23C-07-063, Superior Court of the State of Delaware.
(Updates with detail from the complaint.)
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