An employee of Dominion Voting Systems, a company that has been the target of election-related conspiracies, has filed a defamation lawsuit against those who supposedly pushed conspiracy claims, including the Trump campaign, Newsmax, and One America News Network’s parent company, Herring Networks.
Eric Coomer, the company’s director of product safety and security, filed the suit in Denver on Tuesday. He alleges the 14 defendants promoted unverified election-related conspiracy theories involving Dominion, which put his personal safety at risk, according to the Denver Post.
The defendants include the Trump campaign and Rudy Giuliani, the lead attorney for the campaign; Sidney Powell, another attorney who has worked adjacently to the campaign in their election court battles; Joe Oltmann, a conservative activist who has accused Coomer of treason; and conservative media commentators Michelle Malkin and Eric Metaxas. Media outlets named in the suit are Conservative Daily, Oltmann’s podcast; The Gateway Pundit and its founder Jim Hoft; Herring Networks and one of the network’s anchors, Chanel Rion; and Newsmax.
“Without concern for the truth or the consequences of their reckless conduct, defendants branded Dr. Coomer a traitor to the United States, a terrorist and a criminal of the highest order,” the lawsuit reads. It alleges that Coomer “has been vilified and subjected to an onslaught of offensive messages and harassment” and that he was “forced” to leave his home “in response to multiple credible death threats.”
The lawsuit asks a judge to order the defendants to stop making remarks about Coomer and remove all defamatory allegations from their outlets. The suit also looks for unspecified damages.
Dominion has already taken action against Powell as she has been one of the biggest promoters of election-related conspiracy theories. Last week, they wrote a letter to the former federal prosecutor demanding she retract the “wild, knowingly baseless and false accusations” she’s been about the company.
They called her theories “predicated on lies” that have “endangered Dominion’s business and the lives of its employees.”
Powell has promoted a handful of theories since President-elect Joe Biden won the election, and has filed lawsuits, nicknamed the Kraken, in battleground states the former vice president won that have widely failed in the courts. Some of her allegations are that the voting machines are the same kind used in Venezuela during the Hugo Chavez regime; they have the capability of switching votes secretly; and that there is an illegal vote-changing scheme in U.S. politics that members of both parties have participated in.
Smartmatic, another election technology company that has faced similar allegations from her and others in President Trump’s orbit, sent a letter making the same request to Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network. Newsmax and Fox News both aired fact-checks debunking the claims they had been making for weeks about these companies.
