California Gov. Gavin Newsom is suing Fox News for defamation, alleging that the news outlet intentionally manipulated a video to give the appearance that the governor lied about a phone call with President Trump.
The governor’s demand for $787 million in punitive damages escalates his aggressive effort to challenge misinformation. The lawsuit, announced Friday, places Newsom at the forefront of the political proxy war between Democrats and Republicans over the press by challenging an outlet that many in his party despise.
“By disregarding basic journalistic ethics in favor of malicious propaganda, Fox continues to play a major role in the further erosion of the bedrock principles of informed representative government,” the suit states.
The lawsuit stems from comments Trump made about a phone call with Newsom as tensions heated up between the two leaders over immigration raids and the president’s decision to deploy the National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles.
Trump told reporters on June 10 that he spoke with Newsom “a day ago.”
“Called him up to tell him, got to do a better job, he’s doing a bad job,” Trump said. “Causing a lot of death and a lot of potential death.”
Newsom immediately refuted Trump’s timeline on social media.
The governor had already spoken publicly about talking to Trump on the phone late in the night on June 6 in California, which was early June 7 for Trump on the East Coast. Newsom said the National Guard was never discussed during that call. They didn’t talk again, Newsom said.
“There was no call,” Newsom posted on X. “Not even a voicemail. Americans should be alarmed that a President deploying Marines onto our streets doesn’t even know who he’s talking to.”
Newsom’s lawyers allege in the complaint that by making the call seem more recent, Trump could suggest they discussed the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, which they had not.
Trump attempted to fire back at Newsom through Fox and shared a screenshot of his call log with anchor John Roberts. The log showed that a phone call occurred on June 7 and provided no evidence of a call on June 9 as Trump claimed.
“It is impossible to know for certain whether President Trump’s distortion was intentionally deceptive or merely a result of his poor cognitive state, but Fox’s decision to cover up for the President’s false statement cannot be so easily dismissed,” the complaint states.
Newsom’s legal team said Roberts initially misrepresented the situation to viewers. Then during an evening broadcast on June 10, Fox News host Jesse Watters showed a video of Trump’s comments about the phone call but omitted the president saying that it happened “a day ago.” The edit made it appear that Newsom alleged the two never spoke at all.
“Why would Newsom lie and claim Trump never called him? Why would he do that?” Watters then asked.
Fox News criticized Newsom for attacking free speech.
“Gov. Newsom’s transparent publicity stunt is frivolous and designed to chill free speech critical of him. We will defend this case vigorously and look forward to it being dismissed,” Fox News said in a statement Friday morning.
Newsom is particularly sensitive to his critics on Fox, a conservative television network that he describes as the epicenter of a right-wing media ecosystem that misleads the public to benefit Trump and his allies.
The amount of the governor’s request for damages was a subtle dig at the outlet.
Fox agreed two years ago to pay Dominion Voting Systems a $787-million settlement to drop a lawsuit against the network’s false claims that voting machines were manipulated to help President Biden win the 2020 election.
In a letter to Fox, Newsom’s lawyers said they will voluntarily dismiss the suit if the outlet retracts their claims that he lied about speaking to Trump.
“We expect that you will give the same airtime in retracting these falsehoods as you spent presenting and amplifying them,” his lawyers stated. “Further, Mr. Watters and Fox News must issue a formal on-air apology for the lie you have spread about Governor Newsom.”
