(Headline USA) Fox Corp. said Friday that its chief legal officer who oversaw a $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over defamation allegations is leaving the company.
Viet Dinh, Fox’s chief legal and policy officer, will step down effective Dec. 31, the New York-based company said in a statement. He will remain a “special advisor” to Fox Corp., it added.
Fox News, a unit of Fox Corp., agreed to settle the case brought by the voting machine producer in mid-April following weeks of embarrassing media leaks disclosing the private text and email correspondence of its top personalities.
Records released as part of the lawsuit showed many Fox executives—and even some of its trusted news personalities—were idealogically aligned much farther left than audience members.
One Fox Corp. vice president called the concerns about the rigged electoin “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS.”
During a deposition, Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch testified that he believed the 2020 election was fair and had not been stolen from former President Donald Trump.
Even so, the settlement—which some speculate woke, ESG-pushing Fox shareholder BlackRock may have had a hand in coercing—also proved far more costly than the unprecedented payout.
As a rumored term of the agreement, Fox News shortly thereafter fired its top host, Tucker Carlson, prompting many of its loyal fans to jump ship as well.
While conservatives saw the series of events as a reason to eye the network with suspicion, leftists delighted in its legal defeat, claiming the settlement offered validation of their baseless claims that the 2020 election was the most secure in the history of the planet.
Despite the immense ramifications of the settlement and Carlson’s departure, however, many of the underlying circumstances and agreements remain shrouded in secrecy—ironic given the network’s standing as the No. 1 cable news station and the only major news network trusted by a large portion of the population.
The company did not say why Dinh was leaving Fox Corp. Brian Nick, a spokesman for Fox, said the company had no comment beyond its initial statement.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
