(Washington) An American filed a complaint on Wednesday against Fox News, which he accuses of defamation for having falsely presented him as an undercover FBI agent who incited supporters of Donald Trump to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“After the events of January 6, Fox News was looking for a scapegoat to blame who was neither Donald Trump nor the Republican Party”, assures Ray Epps, in his complaint sent to the justice of the State of Delaware, while the cases Judicial proceedings against the channel accused of disinformation have multiplied.
The channel, popular with conservative viewers, and its star host Tucker Carlson, who has since left Fox News, ran for years “a campaign spreading false allegations about Mr. Epps,” the complainant said.
Ray Epps was presented as an “undercover FBI agent” who incited the crowd “to enter the Capitol violently”, according to the same source.
He claims to have received death threats and lost his job, to have been forced to move and to have suffered “anxiety” because of these unfounded accusations.
The former Marine Corps member, who says he voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, describes himself as a regular Fox News viewer.
Ray Epps had gone to the January 6, 2021 protest, believing that the Republican billionaire’s ‘election had been stolen’ by his Democratic opponent Joe Biden because of ‘lies broadcast by Fox’, but he had not entered. in the precincts of Congress, the complaint points out.
Ray Epps is asking for an unspecified amount of damages to be determined by a jury.
Fox News has been going through a turbulent phase for several months in connection with the information broadcast during the campaign for Donald Trump’s re-election in 2020.
The chain thus agreed in April to pay the historic sum of 787.5 million dollars to an electronic voting machine company, Dominion Voting Systems, to avoid a high-risk defamation lawsuit.
Dominion notably criticized the channel for claiming that the company had rigged the results in favor of Joe Biden against Donald Trump.
Fox News is also the target of a libel suit from Smartmatic, another electronic voting services company, which is claiming $2.7 billion.