Fox News hit with defamation suit by former White House disinfo officer

Nina Jankowicz, a former White House official tasked with running a newly created unit combating disinformation, is suing Fox News for defamation, alleging that the network's false reporting about her job destroyed her reputation and forced her out, reportedThe New York Times on Wednesday.

"Right-wing pundits and politicians falsely portrayed her group as part of an Orwellian bid to control the speech and thought of ordinary Americans," reported Jim Rutenberg and Steven Lee Myers. "Ms. Jankowicz, a prominent specialist in Russian disinformation and online harassment, became the primary subject of their attacks. In 300 mentions over eight months on Fox last year, she was repeatedly demeaned and defamed in highly personal language, the lawsuit asserts. Hosts including Tucker Carlson, Maria Bartiromo and Sean Hannity said her job was 'to silence anyone who criticizes the Biden administration' and possibly even, as Mr. Carlson warned, 'get men with guns to tell you to shut up.'"

But in reality, the report said, "The unit Ms. Jankowicz briefly headed, called the Disinformation Governance Board, had no such powers, or any direct authority to affect speech. The department created it to help unify and oversee existing efforts by its various divisions to monitor and defend against disinformation from foreign agents seeking to influence elections; cartels promoting human smuggling operations; and those seeking to undermine the government’s public health and safety efforts."

Jankowicz further contends that after she resigned to escape from the threats and harassment, Fox News hosts falsely claimed she was "fired."

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According to the report, she is filing the lawsuit in the same Delaware jurisdiction where Dominion Voting Systems filed its $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox — which the network recently settled for $787 million.

Fox News currently faces a number of other legal threats, including a $2.7 billion lawsuit by Smartmatic, another elections equipment company, a lawsuit by shareholders targeting company executives, and a hostile work environment lawsuit by former network producer Abby Grossberg.