Fight for Blake: group raises funds for automobile crash victim’s rehabilitation

 
(MARYVILLE, Mo.) Northwest Missouri State pupil Blake Ommen was included in a vehicle crash on I-29 around St. Joseph and continues to be in the healthcare facility with mind accidents.
Ommen was heading back to Kansas Metropolis for spring break when he was rear-ended in a development zone on the interstate.
“We pulled into our driveway, and we’re anticipating Blake to be household. As we pulled in the driveway, we received a phone from the hospital that Blake experienced been in an accident,” explained Blake’s father, Josh Ommen.
On March 4, Krissy and Josh Ommen acquired the connect with no guardian ever wishes to get: that their youngest son experienced been associated in a motor vehicle accident.
“We were being specified the data that it was critical. He was transferring his arms and legs, but he was on a ventilator. So we did kind of have an strategy of the severity, but just weren’t rather completely for confident what had happened,” explained Josh.
The Ommen’s drove straight to St. Joseph to be with their son where they were being informed that Blake experienced a brain injury, an incident that the relatives is unfortunately no stranger to.
“My mother, when I was about Blake’s age, was was in a auto incident as nicely and suffered a traumatic brain injury,” said Josh. “Regretably, we failed to see the outcomes that we are observing from Blake, and she did not appear out of it. So realizing that I experienced to go into this again with my son was truly a surprising moment.”
As Blake continues to make strides to restoration, he’s not combating on your own — he has the help of his “brothers.”
Because the driver responsible for the incident did not have insurance policies, Northwest Missouri Point out University’s Sigma Tau Gamma fraternity established up a GoFundMe web page to support Blake and his relatives pay out for the health care costs.
“I set it together on my cellphone and posted it on Instagram. And I remember just after that, it just took off,” claimed Tyler Brockhoff, Ommen’s fraternity brother. “It is really all going to Blake’s household, all of it…towards his medical bills, no matter what they need assistance with. It can be all for them.”
But it truly is not just people today from Missouri contributing to Blake’s fund. People from all throughout the state are coming alongside one another to assistance Ommen and his loved ones.
“I recall looking at all those Sig Tau’s from all above the country supporting us, which can make us come to feel amazing,” explained Brockhoff.
“It feels great just realizing that our brothers from around the place have our back again like that,” mentioned Blake’s lifelong very best close friend Jake Coddington.
The Ommen household states they are emotion all of the appreciate and assist for Blake.
“It is really undoubtedly been a wrestle, but we are staying powerful as a family members,” reported Blake’s mother Krissy. “Close friends and family…I will not even know how we say ‘thank you.'”
Although Blake has a long highway to recovery forward of him, the family members continues to see signals of hope.
“We believe that in him. Day-by-day he is getting much better,” said Krissy. “He’s defying what doctor’s said.”
“Blake’s a powerful, positive child, so we’re not astonished,” claimed Josh.
As Blake continues to get well, his mothers and fathers notify us that he will be moved to a lengthy-time period recovery rehabilitation facility in Denver, Colorado.
Posters bearing the images of Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, from left, adorn the front of Fox Corp.’s headquarters in New York City. The stars’ panic as viewers fled after the 2020 elections has become a core element of a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Posters bearing the images of Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, from left, adorn the front of Fox Corp.’s headquarters in New York City. The stars’ panic as viewers fled after the 2020 elections has become a core element of a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Outside legal observers say the Fox News Channel finds itself in real legal jeopardy in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought by an election tech company over lies broadcast about the 2020 presidential race.
The amount and weight of evidence is perhaps without equal among other major, recent defamation cases.
“How often do you get ‘smoking gun’ emails that show, first, that persons responsible for the editorial content knew that the accusation was false, and also convincing emails that show the reason Fox reported this was for its own mercenary interests?” says Rutgers University law professor Ronald Chen, an authority on constitutional and media law.
Fox News has endured one humiliation after another from the rolling revelations in the case brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Private communications made public in legal filings demonstrate the network’s producers, stars and executives — even controlling owner Rupert Murdoch — knew the claims they were broadcasting were false, and at times unhinged. A trial in the case is slated for next month.
Fox attorney: “We don’t suppress the speech that we don’t think is right”
Fox’s legal team is grounding much of its defense in a claim that it was merely reporting allegations by the most newsworthy public official of all, then-President Donald Trump.
“We err on the side of speech because the more and more speech you have, the better chance of having people actually getting the opportunity to point out what’s right and what’s wrong,” attorney Erin Murphy, one of the senior figures on Fox’s defense team, tells NPR in an interview. “And that’s why we don’t suppress the speech that we don’t think is right.”
A loss for Fox would make it harder for all journalists to serve the public, she says.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to hinder the ultimate objective of the First Amendment, of getting to the truth,” Murphy argues.
The case may serve as a test for the elasticity of that argument.
Dominion alleges great reputational harm from false accusations
Fox News was the first major television outlet to project that then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden would win Arizona on election night 2020, which all but put victory out of Trump’s reach. Dominion has alleged that Fox embraced the conspiracy theories about election fraud to try to make up for angering millions of pro-Trump viewers with the Arizona call. Many peeled away to other right-wing outlets.
In the ensuing weeks, Fox repeatedly invited Trump ally and attorney Sidney Powell on its programs to allege Dominion’s voting systems had switched votes from Trump to Biden. Yet Fox hosts and executives privately dismissed her as unreliable and unhinged. Powell had shared with hosts Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo a memo to justify her allegations. Even the memo’s author called the claims “pretty wackadoodle.”
Top executives, including Murdoch and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, told one another they could not bluntly confront their viewers with the facts because that could alienate them further.
Dominion says the baseless claims of fraud have destroyed its reputation for electoral integrity with much of the voting public.
“To simply say Fox is a bunch of liars … is a slippery slope”
Even with that record, set out with voluminous documentation, some media lawyers say Fox’s attorneys may be right in predicting that a loss would constrict the media’s freedoms.
“No matter how much I might personally deplore what Fox is alleged to have done, I worry a lot more about the longer term-ramifications,” says University of Minnesota media law professor Jane Kirtley, a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
“To simply say Fox is a bunch of liars — that they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this and their wild speculations should not be reported and should not be protected — I just think that that is a slippery slope,” says Kirtley.
Were Fox to lose, “there would be a scramble by other news organizations to distance themselves from Fox’s techniques and Fox’s editorial decisions,” Kirtley says. “But the problem is that by lifting the veil on the editorial decision-making process, we are now going to see all news organizations called into question going forward.” She says she believes such a verdict finding Fox liable for defamation would encourage more such cases.
Dominion’s legal team shared a statement stating that the voting tech company believes in the First Amendment and its protections, but that Fox crossed a line after the 2020 election: “As long-settled law makes clear, the First Amendment does not shield broadcasters that knowingly or recklessly spread lies.”
It’s hard for plaintiffs to win defamation suits but that could change
Media outlets rarely lose defamation cases in court. Under a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the New York Times, plaintiffs have to prove the claims made about them were false and damaging to their reputation. Additionally, they have to prove that those making the statements in question either knew the assertions were untrue or had good reason to know they were untrue, and willfully ignored that information. That’s known as “actual malice,” under the late Justice William Brennan’s decision.
Brennan also argued Americans should have latitude to get some things wrong in talking about public officials and politics, in order to ensure free and robust debate.
Two current Supreme Court justices, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, have indicated they would be open to making it easier for plaintiffs to prevail in defamation suits. A third, Elena Kagan, published her own musings years before she joined the court that the protections for the press might be too strong.
The idea of “actual malice,” Murphy says, requires Dominion to prove specific people directly involved with the broadcasts knew the statements they aired were wrong. For instance, Murdoch’s sworn statements that he had dismissed the claims of election fraud as bogus, and affirmed under oath that some of his star hosts had nonetheless endorsed them publicly, carries no legal weight, she says.
“Anybody would have to acknowledge that what the president and his lawyers were doing was newsworthy in and of itself, regardless of whether the allegations were ultimately going to be anything they could prove,” Murphy says. She invoked what journalists consider the safe ground of “neutral reporting” — just telling their audiences what others are saying.
Law professor: The financial motives to present lies “probably destroy” Fox’s defense
In its legal briefs, Fox leans heavily on the idea that news organizations must be allowed to convey allegations by major public figures to their audiences — even wild allegations. Rutgers’ Chen says that doesn’t hold up if Fox was motivated by profit instead of the newsworthiness of the claims being presented in its programs.
“The fact that there was arguably a motive by Fox to publish these accusations against Dominion based on its own economic interests in retaining Trump viewers would, if believed by the jury, probably destroy that argument,” Chen says.
He’s not the only legal scholar skeptical of Fox’s argument that a loss would ripple through journalism.
“Even if Dominion makes their case and convinces a jury to shovel truckloads of Fox’s money to [the election tech company], nothing in this case presents a meaningful threat to the First Amendment,” says Charles Glasser, who was global media counsel for Bloomberg News for 14 years and now teaches journalism and media law at New York University. “It really comes down to the facts about how the story was crafted and disseminated.”
In his sworn responses to questioning from Dominion attorney Justin Nelson, Fox Corp. boss Murdoch acknowledged that four of his star hosts — Dobbs, Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity — had endorsed the baseless claims of election fraud, at least “a bit” in the case of Hannity. He referred to them as commentators. Opinions have even more latitude under case law than straight-ahead reporting. (Dobbs left his post at Fox Business Network a day after a second election tech company, Smartmatic, filed its own $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox. That case is not as far along as Dominion’s.)
Yet Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum also were deeply concerned about the loss of viewers and deliberated about how to win them back, evidence uncovered by Dominion’s attorneys and separate reporting by the New York Times‘ Peter Baker show.
Legendary media lawyer sees Fox News case as “bizarre” exception to the norm
When news outlets do lose defamation cases, they often result in retractions or apologies and settlements while they’re still on appeal. The two most prominent defamation cases of recent years resulted in divergent outcomes.
In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine settled separate cases filed by a University of Virginia dean and a campus fraternity after a collapse of standards in reporting on what turned out to be a source’s fabricated account of campus rape.
A year ago, the New York Times prevailed against former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin after an editorial wrongly linked her advertisements from her political action committee to a mass shooting months later.
“Generally speaking, it is not a good idea to permit a wholesale inquiry into newsroom decisions as a whole, and also I include ownership as part of that inquiry,” James Goodale, the legendary New York Times general counsel who advised the paper to publish the Pentagon Papers, tells NPR in an email. “Newsroom decisions, including ownership decisions as to news judgment, should be protected by the First Amendment.”
Libel and defamation cases override such protections, he notes.
“The Dominion case is such a strange case it provides an exception to the general rule,” Goodale says. “Let us hope we don’t see such a bizarre case as this one again.”
On Feb. 3, three families lost a son and a sibling, when John “Luke” Fergusson, Joshua Mardis and Nicholas Troutman died in a car accident.
The past few weeks have been difficult — and each of the families struggled to pinpoint exactly what the hardest part has been.
“Certain days are just unbearable,” Anne Fergusson, Luke’s mom, said, “and others are a little better.”
But the three families have banded together to support each other — they’re “forever bound,” as Joshua’s mom, Yvette Mardis, said. They’ve also received support from not only friends and family, but the JMU community as well.
The Fergussons and Troutmans found out about the accident after police knocked on their doors at 3:30 a.m. the morning of Feb. 3. The Mardis family, in England at the time, said they were in suspense for hours trying to get home.
Yvette said her first thought was, “This can’t possibly be real.”
“That’s the mind at work,” Yvette said. “The news is too terrible to want to believe. So the mind doesn’t want to believe it, and you don’t.”
Joshua’s father, Kirk Mardis, added to his wife’s answer: “I think you think you’re in a nightmare, honestly, and you’re hoping to wake up.”
When Elizabeth “Liza” Fergusson, Luke’s younger sister, found out, she said it was something she never could’ve imagined and the “worst thing ever.”
“It was never something that crossed my mind, that I was gonna lose my brother,” Liza said.
Joshua Mardis with his parents, Yvette and Kirk, and sister Haley during Christmas.
Courtesy of Haley Mardis
John Troutman, Nicholas’ father, said his son and his friends always took measures to keep everyone safe — “it didn’t make any sense,” he said.
Nicholas would’ve turned 20 years old Feb. 23, and Luke would’ve turned 20 on Feb. 18. Anne said those were “harder days.”
For Jessica Troutman, Nicholas’ mother, there’s no single thing that stands out as the hardest part of it all. It’s “everything,” she said. For Kirk, as others echoed, it’s knowing his son won’t physically be in his life anymore.
“Something beautiful’s been ripped out of your life forever, but you fight against that despair to try to go forward,” Kirk said.
Haley Mardis, Joshua’s sister, said the hardest part has been thinking about her future and all the parts of it that Joshua will miss, and all the things she’ll miss out on because he’s gone. Choking up, she listed several things that have come to mind in the past few weeks.
“Knowing that he’s not gonna be at my wedding and he’s not gonna be a groomsman … Just knowing that I’m an only child, kind of, now,” Haley said. “It’s just weird to think, like, all of these things that he’s supposed to be a part of, like, I don’t get to be an aunt to his kids and I don’t get to give his girlfriend a hard time.”
The Fergussons are coping in different ways, Anne said. She uses humor, like Luke. John Fergusson, Luke’s dad, has gone back to work and copes with a to-do checklist. Liza’s gone back to school, but Anne said she’s basically given up on homework. Liza agreed, saying when everyone else is slacking off in their last semester of high school, she slacks off a bit more and is “just spiraling.”
But each family has leaned on one another. Each set of parents attended all three memorial services on the weekend of Feb. 17-20. The moms and siblings have group text chains together to keep in touch.
Each family is in their own little world, “grieving and tired,” Jessica said. Yvette said they’re all attempting to “come out of the funk and the grief” and back to a “semblance of normal life.” But they still reach out to check in on each other.
This past weekend, Yvette said, Anne texted the other moms to say, “I hope everyone has a good tomorrow.”
“That’s it right now, we hope we have a good tomorrow,” Yvette said. “We hope we get up out of bed tomorrow, you know, and then we have, we can function and have a good day.”
Haley also said she’s been talking with Jack Troutman, Nicholas’ older brother, and Liza. She said it’s been comforting. They’re all only children now: Joshua, Nicholas and Luke were their only siblings.
Yvette said moving forward isn’t something anyone can do alone.
“We’re trying to find comfort and support with each other and trying to remember our boys and find comfort and remember their love,” Yvette said. “And hopefully, one day we’re gonna be more happy than sad having these memories right now. But we get support from each other that way as well because there were three families that lost their children that evening.”
At John “Luke” Fergusson’s memorial service, a table was set up with pictures and other items representing Luke’s life.
Shirin Zia Faqiri / The Breeze
Jessica said her family and Fergussons knew each other only a little bit before the accident, as Nicholas and Luke were roommates. Joshua was a new friend to Luke and Nicholas, so the Fergussons and Troutmans didn’t know the Mardises beforehand. But through their grief, she said, they’ve forged a lifelong bond.
“It has been … so supportive and so comforting in a way that you would never wish on anybody else,” Jessica said. “Like, the fact that these two other families are going through this as well is awful, that all three of us are having to go through this, but it’s been so supportive.”
John Fergusson said his family drove with the Troutmans to Joshua’s memorial service in Williamsburg, Virginia, so they were in the car together for a few hours.
Throughout the hardship, all three families said they’ve received overwhelming support — from each other, from their hometowns and from JMU.
John and Anne Fergusson said Hollie Hall, JMU’s dean of students, was a tremendous help keeping them updated on the day of the accident and working with them to bring their son back while crossing state lines from the accident in West Virginia. Jessica said JMU helped with things that hadn’t even crossed her mind.
“JMU didn’t even blink,” Jessica said.
She got an email the day after the accident, Jessica said, saying their tuition payments had been stopped.
While the Mardises were in the U.K., Yvette and Kirk said they received so much support and help — not just from JMU, friends and family but also from their hotel and airline carrier.
“Our refrigerators are full, we never have to think about meals, we never have to think about getting things that we need,” Yvette said. “If I need something … my friends are here, and they’re there supporting me and they’re supporting us, and this is the kind of thing you can’t do alone.”
Each family said the vigil held at JMU was helpful to them, and John Fergusson said seeing different colleges light up with JMU colors and the thousands of people who showed up for the vigil meant a lot to them. Anne said she thought it was really helpful for the kids and Luke’s, Joshua’s and Nicholas’ friends.
Each family has received support from people within their home communities, too. The Troutmans got a letter from Nicholas’ friend from JMU in their mailbox, and Anne said the Fergussons received bags with plastic lights and messages about Luke on them.
“Just hearing all those [stories] just helps us, you know, it feels really good to hear all those stories and things from his friends,” Jessica said.
Yvette, who works at NASA Langley Research Center, and Kirk, who works at FCN IT, said their places of work have been helpful accommodating them as they grieve and get everything settled.
With the support of the community, friends and family, each of the families said seeing all of the photos and videos sent in of their sons gives them a great comfort, seeing how their boys were and the men they were becoming.
“Things that have been shared from [Joshua’s] friends and from the JMU community have made us so really, really proud of him and so sorry that, you know, he’s not going to be here to become the wonderful man that he was, he was becoming,” Yvette said.
Although Nicholas was known as a social butterfly, his dad said he often came home to recharge with his family. Jessica also said he was a hard worker who ran a business in the summer and took on jobs in the neighborhood to earn money before going back to school. Nicholas was a business major, but he was still figuring out what to do after college.
“He was different than … when he was in the videos and pictures we’ve seen. He, I think when he came home, he came home to recharge, you know? Slept late, and you know, kind of watch TV with us and stuff like that,” John Troutman said. “Of course he made time for his friends, but he also, you know, never slouched on doing things with us and his brother and his grandparents.”
The Fergussons said their son Luke was just an “easy baby,” that he was kind and funny and cared about his family. John Fergusson said Luke took Liza wherever she wanted to go — like Cookout and Starbucks — whenever he came back from college, and Anne said she’d purposefully take the long way back to JMU for vacations just to hear him speak.
“He would just talk, talk, talk and tell me everything,” Anne said, and he’d eventually notice and ask, “Where are we, and why is this drive taking so long?”
Yvette said Joshua loved JMU, and on the night of the accident, he told her about how much he loved it there and how happy he was.
“Josh was just very resilient and very kind,” Kirk said. “That’s the two things that kind of make his legacy, it was that he never gave up.”
Michael Dye, one of Joshua’s friends from Walsingham Academy, said during his memorial service that Joshua worked very hard to get into JMU and that it was where he wanted to be. Joshua was very proud of being a Duke, Dye said.
“He keeps me going every day,” Dye said. “I know we will keep his memory alive … As he wrote in my senior yearbook, ‘I love you, bro. Friends for life.’”
While they still don’t know exactly how or why the accident happened, the Fergussons, Mardises and Troutmans have found leaning on each other for support means a lot during this time of healing and moving forward.
Jessica said something Rabbi Mordy Leimdorfer said at JMU’s vigil stuck with her:
“You know, we can ask why a million times and … we may never know why … but we can ask the question, ‘What?’” Jessica said. “What can we do to support each other? What can we do to get through this? What can we do to honor Nicholas and Luke and Josh’s memories? Yeah, what can we do to support each other and heal? And so we can’t look back. We can’t change anything, but we can look forward.”
While the families didn’t know each other well before the accident, after losing their sons and brothers, each mom said it’s a bond they wouldn’t wish on any family.
“I think that’ll keep the Fergussons, Troutmans and Mardises together for a while,” Anne said. “We now share this forever.”
The disclosure of emails and texts in which Fox News executives and personalities disparaged the same election conspiracies being floated on their shows has greatly increased the chances that a defamation case against the network will succeed, legal experts say.
Dominion Voting Systems included dozens of messages sent internally by Fox co-founder Rupert Murdoch and on-air stars such as Tucker Carlson in a brief made public last week in support of the voting technology company’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against the network. Dominion claims it was damaged in the months after the 2020 election after Fox repeatedly aired false statements that it was part of a conspiracy to fraudulently elect Joe Biden.
Dominion said the emails and texts show that Fox’s hosts and executives knew the claims being peddled by then-president Donald Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell weren’t true — some employees privately described them as “ludicrous” and “mind blowingly nuts”— but Fox kept airing them to keep its audience from changing channels.
Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for $1.6 billion on March 26, 2021, for repeated false claims about election fraud made by the network’s hosts and guests. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
If so, the messages could amount to powerful body of evidence against Fox, according to First Amendment experts, because they meet a critical and difficult-to-meet standard in such cases.
“You just don’t often get smoking-gun evidence of a news organization saying internally, ‘We know this is patently false, but let’s forge ahead with it,’” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah professor who specializes in media law.
Under New York Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 Supreme Court ruling that has guided libel and defamation claims for nearly 60 years, a plaintiff like Dominion must show that a defendant like Fox published false statements with “actual malice” — meaning that it was done “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
Based on the messages revealed last week, “I think that Dominion both will and should prevail,” said Laurence Tribe, a former Harvard law professor. “If anything, the landmark this case is likely to establish will help show that New York Times v. Sullivan” is not an impossible legal hurdle to clear, as some critics have claimed.
“While it’s true that the Supreme Court [in Sullivan] has set a high bar for plaintiffs, a high bar doesn’t mean no bar,” said Sonja R. West, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Georgia law school. “What we’re seeing in this case looks an awful lot like the exception that proves the rule. The First Amendment often protects speakers who make innocent or even negligent mistakes, but this does not mean they can knowingly tell lies that damage the reputation of others.”
In fact, Fox has cited the ruling in its defense, arguing that its reporting and commentary on Dominion were legitimate newsgathering activities that Sullivan was designed to protect.
Fox said in a statement that Dominion has used “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law,” In the network’s own brief seeking summary judgment, Fox’s lawyers argued: “It is plain as day that any reasonable viewer would understand that Fox News was covering and commenting on allegations about Dominion, not reporting that the allegations were true.”
Fox’s attempt to defend itself with Sullivan notably clashes with efforts by some prominent conservatives to undo the ruling. Trump has said numerous times it should be easier for people to claim libel against the news media. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has backed state legislation to do just that. Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch have also suggested the Sullivan standard should be revisited.
The “actual malice” standard makes it hard to win defamation lawsuits because of the difficulty in demonstrating a reporter or publisher‘s state of mind before publication. It places the burden on the plaintiff to prove that the reporter was not simply just wrong, but knew it and proceeded regardless.
Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox has already progressed further than many defamation suits, said Charles Harder, an attorney who has represented Trump and his wife, Melania, in libel cases. He said judges often dismiss such suits before the start of discovery — the process of collecting of internal documents by the plaintiff that resulted in Fox texts and emails being made public last week. Dominion’s representatives spent months obtaining the emails and text messages and conducting depositions with the Fox hosts and executives who were cited in the brief disclosed last week.
“The key here is that Dominion was allowed to take discovery and obtain the internal communications at Fox,” said Harder, who also represented professional wrestler Hulk Hogan in an invasion-of-privacy action that resulted in a $140 million verdict against Gawker Media in 2016. “Too many plaintiffs, likely with meritorious cases, have their cases dismissed early and are denied the opportunity to obtain evidence to prove their claims.”
Unless Fox can persuade Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis to dismiss the case or strikes a settlement agreement with Dominion, it will probably have to face a jury. That could prove perilous, said Harder.
“In my experience, juries have no sympathy for media companies that knowingly cause harm to others,” he said.
Last year a jury in Connecticut in October ordered Alex Jones to pay $965 million to the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, whom he had repeatedly lied about on his shows. Amid a jury trial in 2017, Disney-owned ABC News paid a beef producer more than $177 million to settle allegations that it had slandered the company by describing one of its meat products as “pink slime” on-air.
Fox has questioned Dominion’s claim to $1.6 billion in damages, arguing that the figure is many times greater than Dominion’s net worth. “The record confirms that Dominion has not suffered any economic harm at all,” Fox wrote in a brief. “Its financials are better than ever.”
Yet some legal scholars are stunned by the behind-the-scenes statements collected by Dominion, and how blatantly Fox’s insiders expressed doubts about what their company was putting on the air.
“Those of us who study these sorts of defamation claims against the media are much more accustomed to cases that have a variety of pieces of circumstantial evidence of reckless disregard for the truth,” Andersen Jones said. “This filing is different.”
She noted that the internal messages show key figures at Fox casting aspersions on Fox’s own decisions. They also show an unusually clear timeline and motivation, she said, noting that Fox continued to broadcast allegedly defamatory statements even after Dominion had alerted the network that the claims were false. There’s also evidence that Fox executives decided to keep broadcasting the false statements because they feared losing viewers if they didn’t.
“We just don’t have examples of major media cases with this kind of evidentiary record,” she said.
West put it even more starkly.
The messages, she said, are “incredibly damning.”
correction
A previous version of this story misspelled Sidney Powell’s first name.
T-R Photograph BY ROBERT MAHARRY
McFarland Clinic’s Marshalltown area is pictured. The Iowa Legislature lately passed a bill that would cap the volume of noneconomic damages awarded in healthcare malpractice lawsuits at $2 million for hospitals and $1 million for clinics and personal companies.

DES MOINES — Due to the fact convening for the 90th Basic Assembly previous thirty day period, the Republican-controlled Iowa Legislature has wasted no time finding to function on many of Gov. Kim Reynolds’s major priorities. After offering a invoice generating Education and learning Personal savings Accounts to the governor’s desk, which she promptly signed, lawmakers moved on to capping the total of noneconomic damages plaintiffs in healthcare malpractice lawsuits can get at $2 million from hospitals and $1 million from clinics or person providers.
Reynolds issued a statement late Wednesday after the legislation passed in both of those chambers, 54-46 in the Household and 29-20 in the Senate, with some Republicans signing up for Democrats in voting towards it.
“I’m grateful to the legislature for passing affordable clinical malpractice reform, making it possible for Iowa’s wellbeing treatment industry to turn into much better and additional obtainable. To the OBGYNs and physicians who have been apprehensive about training in Iowa, we are completely ready for you,” Reynolds explained. “These reforms balance the requires of wounded individuals with the desires of all Iowans to have a robust wellbeing care program. As I mentioned in my Problem of the State, these reforms could not hold out a different 12 months.”
Alison Wilson, a healthcare medical professional with McFarland Clinic in Marshalltown, counts herself in assist of the invoice and described the variance involving economic damages like medical costs and shed wages, which have not been capped, and noneconomic damages like emotional strain, anguish and inconvenience.
“While there surely is psychological distress and loss related to any injuries or unexpected result, the recent position supplies no regulation of the total of income that can be awarded for this particular element,” Wilson claimed. “Because there is no cap, the plaintiff and his or her legal professional can need astronomical amounts of revenue. In numerous of the massive settlements that make the headlines, the unlimited non-financial awards are what make up most of these quantities. The proposed adjust would not eradicate the noneconomic awards, but established a reasonable volume limit that could be used fairly.”
Wilson extra that Iowa is one of the only Midwestern states with out a noneconomic damages limit, and she believes it is producing the condition significantly less aggressive in attracting best expertise to observe medicine here.
“We supply superior care and Iowa medical doctors are very conservative in mother nature. We really don’t get a large amount of additional exams or follow ‘defensively.’ However, medical professionals are retiring quicker, not heading to the smaller cities exactly where there is much less specialty backup, and the young doctors are deciding upon to apply in other places thanks to the hostile litigious environment we are permitting,” she explained. “Iowa is a superb location to dwell and function and increase a household, but we wrestle to recruit persons not at first from Iowa. We never used to get issues from healthcare college students and people about the malpractice ecosystem, but now that is a typical problem from company candidates.”
On the flip aspect, Chip Baltimore, a former Republican condition representative and longtime demo law firm, does not imagine the invoice will reach its meant targets of attracting much more healthcare pros to the point out and keeping insurance charges down.
“I oppose this bill simply because the extensive vast majority of the available proof displays that all the cap will do is harm those people harmless people who are wounded by the carelessness of some others. The evidence does not help the statements that this cap will maximize entry to well being care, assist in recruiting new health treatment industry experts, or decrease malpractice insurance coverage premiums. The evidence does not advise that the former legislation without the cap triggered any lessen in health care entry or impeded that care in any way,” he said. “In examining the really couple of circumstances utilized by the clinical industry as causes to go this regulation, the documentation reveals that the health-related insurance policies sector is refusing to negotiate fair settlements in very good religion with hurt people, forcing the circumstances to trial and producing everybody to incur considerable expense and hazard.”
Baltimore proposed a handful of other motives why the state struggles to entice new professional medical providers: Iowa’s minimal health care reimbursement level for Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance, the sensation that they can not receive more than enough in sparsely-populated areas to repay their pupil credit card debt and a general drive to exercise in city regions with far more to offer young men and women and people.
He also questioned users of his have celebration who assert pro-daily life concepts but would assistance these types of a invoice.
“The most ardent pro-everyday living politicians, generally Republicans, publicly declare that every daily life is priceless, and that we are not able to put a price on lifestyle — and especially that the federal government can’t set a rate on everyday living. Still, by enacting a law that limits the amount of money a particular person or spouse and children can get from a negligent health care provider or healthcare facility to a set amount, which is just what they have performed – place a federal government-mandated, just one-measurement-suits-all cost on a lifetime, no matter of the damages brought on,” Baltimore reported. “In addition, the professional medical field and their coverage companies argue that if a little one dies as a outcome of clinical carelessness before it is born, it is not a individual and hence has sustained no damages. Zero pounds for the lifetime of the infant.”
As this concern went to push, Reynolds experienced not but signed the bill, but she is predicted to do so soon. Among nearby legislators, Sen. Jeff Edler (R-Condition Middle) and Rep. Dave Deyoe (R-Nevada) voted in favor, and Rep. Sue Cahill (D-Marshalltown) opposed it.





Present day breaking information and much more in your inbox
Information businesses are even now having difficulties around how to go over Donald Trump.
A long time soon after he crashed on to the political scene and ascended to the Oval Office environment, in significant section by exploiting the press’ insatiable urge for food for spectacle, the nation’s top rated news businesses carry on to give oxygen to the disgraced president’s trivial stunts.
A variation of this report first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Indicator up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape right here.
The most up-to-date illustration arrives by way of Bob Woodward. Trump this week filed a $50 million lawsuit from the Pulitzer Prize-successful journalist, alleging that when Woodward released audio of their interviews in his audiobook it breached his legal rights by constituting copyright violations.
The action is just just one of numerous threats and lawsuits submitted by the former president versus journalists and news companies more than the decades that produced big headlines and were being exploited by Trump for political attain, only for them to be afterwards unceremoniously tossed out by the courts.
Most authorized specialists CNN contacted on Tuesday speedily dismissed Trump’s lawsuit towards Woodward as meritless. Here’s a sampling of what they explained:
► Charles Tobin, a Initially Modification lawyer, explained it “has no authorized benefit whatsoever” and is “just yet another illustration of Trump seeking to command the information.”
► Ted Boutrous, a further Initially Amendment lawyer, said the Structure secured Woodward’s appropriate to publish the audio, incorporating, “This is nonetheless an additional frivolous lawsuit by Donald Trump intended to punish and chill flexibility of the press that once once again shows his finish misunderstanding of journalism.”
► Floyd Abrams, the renowned Very first Amendment lawyer of Pentagon Papers fame, reported he “can’t think of a less successful litigant of public take note than Donald Trump” and stated he didn’t see “any apparent foundation for Trump retaining that Woodward agreed that the on-the-document job interview could not be posted or if not disseminated by Woodward as he did.”
► Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of 1st Amendment Legislation at Harvard Law University, described “most of the claims” in the lawsuit as “obviously rubbish,” outlining they are “preempted by federal copyright law.” (Tushnet, however, did say that the underlying copyright problem is attention-grabbing, provided there is tiny circumstance legislation on the subject matter.)
It only took CNN a handful of hours to collect this qualified commentary. But in its place of big retailers pausing to gather this considerably-wanted context after Trump submitted his match in opposition to Woodward, most newsrooms simply released stories echoing his criticism. In outcome, news shops like the Associated Push, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, NBC Information, POLITICO, Axios, CNN, and other folks ran tales that performed straight into Trump’s hands.
And whilst some stories, like CNN’s, noted the previous president has a historical past of filing lawsuits that finally get tossed out of court, the stories however gave Trump the headlines he desired and amplified his lawsuit’s allegations, all with no presenting audience a lot needed context from unbiased legal professionals.
Indeed, these outlets also revealed a remark issued by Woodward and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, defending their actions (though some rushed to publish so frantically that they didn’t even wait for the reaction.) But weighting their argument similarly against Trump’s doesn’t appear to be to be adequate when masking a determine who is regarded for lying, maligning the press, pulling political stunts, and — especially — submitting frivolous lawsuits from perceived enemies.
In fact, the way in which most newsrooms included this tale is significantly disappointing specified that just earlier this thirty day period, a federal decide admonished Trump and his legal group for filing what was deemed a frivolous lawsuit. In that case, Trump and his law firm were being purchased to pay a staggering sum of virtually $1 million.
Judge Donald Middlebrooks pointed to Trump’s “pattern of misusing the courts to serve political purposes” as he took be aware of a number of other failed lawsuits Trump has introduced in current yrs. “Mr. Trump is using the courts as a phase established for political theater and grievance. This habits interferes with the skill of the judiciary to complete its constitutional responsibility,” he wrote.
It is also dismaying supplied the greater dialogue amid the push over the many years about not succumbing hook, line, and sinker for Trump’s stunts. If the press is nonetheless failing to do its owing diligence on a straightforward story like this, that does not bode perfectly as the state hurtles towards what is currently gearing up to be an unsightly 2024 presidential race.
