California Gov. Gavin Newsom filed a $787 million lawsuit against Fox News on Friday, seeking $787 million in damages and citing, among other things, host Jesse Watters’ claim that he lied about a phone call the governor made with Donald Trump.“No more lies,” Newsom wrote on X, announcing the lawsuit.The damages figure is, at the very least, symbolic. That is about the same amount that the network settled Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit two years ago. The election systems company had sued for defamation over the network’s amplification of false claims it rigged 2020 election results. 4-In the lawsuit, Newsom’s legal team wrote that the litigation “concerns Fox’s willingness to protect President Trump from his own false statements by smearing his political opponent Governor Newsom in a dispute over when the two last spoke during a period of national strife.”The lawsuit concerns a call that Newsom had with Trump late on June 6, the day before the president federalized the National Guard to respond to protests following ICE raids in the Los Angeles region. Newsom opposed that move, and said that the president didn’t raise the issue of the demonstrations or the National Guard in their phone call.6-Days later, on June 10, Trump claimed to reporters that he had spoken to Newsom “a day ago” about the demonstrations in Los Angeles, the lawsuit noted. But Newsom quickly challenged that claim, writing in a post on X, “There was no call. 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.”Per the lawsuit, Trump then reached out to Fox News anchor John Roberts with a screenshot of his call log, showing a 16-minute call on June 6/7. Roberts then wrote on X, “President Trump just contacted me from Air Force 1 to say this: ‘First call was not picked up. Second call, Gavin Picked up, we spoke for 16 minutes. I told him to, essentially, ‘get his ass in gear,’ and stop the Riots, which were out of control. More than anything else, this shows what a liar he is — said I never called. Here is the evidence.”Newsom’s legal team wrote that Roberts’ post “did not provide the critical fact that on June 10, President Trump had stated that he had spoken to Governor Newsom ‘a day ago.’ Nor did Mr. Roberts note that on June 6 — or June 7 at 1:23 am — is not ‘a day ago’ when one is speaking on June 10.” Roberts then went on air and “intentionally altered how he presented President Trump’s comment, stating that President Trump had said that he had called Governor Newsom ‘yesterday or the other day,'” Newsom’s lawsuit stated.“Mr. Roberts chose to present a factually incorrect picture to Fox viewers to obscure President Trump’s false statement of fact,” Newsom’s legal team argued.On June 10, Watters played a clip of Trump’s statement about the call, but removed the president saying that the call occurred “a day ago,” per the lawsuit.Watters told viewers, “Newsom responded, and he said there wasn’t a phone call. He said Trump never called him. Not even a voicemail, he said. But John Roberts got Trump’s call logs, and it shows Trump called him late Friday night and they talked for 16 minutes. Why would Newsom lie and claim Trump never called him? Why would he do that?”As Watters spoke, the Fox News chyron read, “Gavin Lied About Trump’s Call.”“Recognizing that President Trump was not correct, yet wanting to curry favor with the President, Fox News willfully distorted the facts,” the lawsuit claimed. “Instead of accurately presenting President Trump’s words—that he had spoken to Governor Newsom ‘a day ago’ —Mr. Roberts told viewers that President Trump had said that he spoke to Governor Newsom ‘yesterday or the other day.’ On his nightly program, Mr. Watters also purposefully presented a false picture of President Trump’s statement.”The lawsuit was filed in Delaware Superior Court, but was accompanied by a legal demand letter from Newsom’s lawyers to Fox News’ general counsel. They wrote that the lawsuit would be withdrawn if the network retracts the claim and issues an apology from Watters and the network. 14-A Fox News said in response to the lawsuit, “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.”The network noted that Roberts made it clear that the call was from June 6-7. Roberts said, “Now, granted, this was on Saturday. But look, there is one twenty two o’clock in the morning, which would have been ten o’clock at night, ten twenty two at night, California time. There was an outgoing call for four seconds and then there was an outgoing call for 16 minutes.”Newsom’s legal team noted that the report has been “amplified by far-right activists on social media,” and claimed that the network “advanced this lie about Governor Newsom out of a desire to harm him politically.”“The issue is about more than just President Trump misremembering a day or two about routine phone calls,” according to the lawsuit. “The period of June 6 to June 10, 2025 in California was unprecedented—with the President of the United States illegally commandeering the California National Guard and deploying uniformed military onto the streets of Los Angeles over the objections of the state’s governor. Every hour, every Truth Social post, and every presidential utterance mattered. History was happening in real time. It is the exact reason why reporters asked President Trump when he had last spoken to Governor Newsom. In response, he lied. And when his own ‘receipts’ showed that, Fox, true to form, carried his water and sought to cover up his lies by defaming Governor Newsom.”The lawsuit claimed defamation per se, and California’s unfair competition law, typically used in false advertising claims. The latter claim has similarities to Trump’s lawsuit against CBS over the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris, claiming that they edited the interview to make her answers sound better just weeks before the election.While a number of legal experts have called Trump’s lawsuit meritless, given First Amendment protections for newsgathering, Newsom’s lawsuit appeared to be a way of using Fox News commentator’s words against them.The lawsuit stated, “As Mr. Watters has himself said, when a news organization falsely presents an elected official’s words to make them appear in a better light, it constitutes ‘an extraordinary breach of journalistic ethics…Someone has to be fired.”The bar for Newsom’s defamation claim is high: As a public figure, he must prove that the network didn’t just falsely report on the call, but did so with malice toward him.
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