- Former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg is claiming her ex-employer withheld evidence from Dominion.
- Grossberg claims Fox failed to turn over audio recordings featuring Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani.
- Grossberg, who is suing Fox for discrimination, was fired last month.
A former Fox News producer who last month sued the company for discrimination is now accusing her ex-employer of failing to turn over audio recordings of conversations with leading 2020 election deniers that could hurt its defense in the Dominion defamation case.
In an amended complaint filed Tuesday in Delaware, attorneys for Abby Grossberg, who worked as a producer for Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, say that their client has recordings and transcripts of conversations with Trump campaign attorneys Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and others that were conducted in the wake of the 2020 election — and which, in some cases, show that they knew the claims they were making about a rigged vote were not supported by evidence.
A spokesperson for Fox News, Irena Briganti, rejected Grossberg’s allegations. “Fox has complied with its discovery obligations in the Dominion case,” she told Insider.
In one recording, said to have taken place on or about November 15, 2020, Giuliani was asked by Bartiromo, ahead of their on-air segment, what evidence he had implicating Dominion Voting Systems in widespread election fraud, as alleged by the Trump campaign. “[T]hat’s a little harder,” Giuliani responded.
Asked about a particular claim concerning the maker of voting machines and election software — that Democratic lawmaker Nancy Pelosi had a stake in the company — Giuliani was even more forthcoming, according to Grossberg’s filing: “I’ve read that. I can’t prove that.”
Bartiromo would go on to tell her viewers, regardless (and falsely): “Nancy Pelosi has an interest in this company.” That line is cited in the lawsuit filed by Dominion, which is seeking $1.6 in damages for what it says was defamation. A judge recently ruled that the Dominion case should go to trial, saying Fox had unquestionably spread false claims about the company and failed to conduct “good-faith, disinterested reporting.”
Grossberg says the conversation with Giuliani — and another with Sidney Powell — had been uploaded to Otter, a transcription service used by Fox News employees, and that many of the transcriptions were shared and discussed over email. Fox News attorneys also had access to Grossberg’s phones and email, providing them “access to the audio recordings and transcripts” of such interviews that showed claims about Dominion “were woefully unsupported.”
Despite having this access to the recordings, however, Grossberg alleges that Fox News failed to share the conversations during the discovery process, omitting evidence that speaks directly “to the issue of whether Fox News acted with malice in publishing defamatory statements about Dominion.”
Grossberg, who was fired by Fox News in March after filing her lawsuit — which alleges her career was stymied by rampant misogyny within the company — says she also spoke, along with Bartiromo, to a “high-ranking advisor to and spokesperson for President Trump” who admitted that contra public claims, the Trump campaign had no evidence that voting machines enabled fraud in Georgia.
“The Trump advisor tellingly responded that there were in fact no issues with those machines,” according to Grossberg’s legal filing. The same advisor, according to the filing, also lamented that the media was not paying more attention to the upcoming certification of electors, saying there had been “virtually no pick up of the January 6th date” by the press.
Powell, likewise, was unable to back up some of her wilder claims, according to the filing. Asked for her most “compelling evidence” of fraud in an off-air conversation with Bartiromo, for example, Powell responded by saying there was a “witness who’s given a foreign declaration about how [the voting software] was created, why it was created, and watched it work.”
A Dominion spokesperson declined to comment.
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