Fox News, which recently settled two high-profile legal challenges for a combined $800 million, is now facing a defamation and false light lawsuit from a man who said the network presented him as a “scapegoat” for the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol.
Ray Epps attended the pro-Trump rallies in Washington in January 2021 but was not among the people found to have breached the Capitol building and was never charged for his conduct. In subsequent weeks, then-Fox host Tucker Carlson highlighted a video clip of the Arizona man outside the Capitol to suggest that Epps might have been a government informant — a notion that Epps and the FBI have strongly denied.
In a March 23 letter, a lawyer for Epps, Michael Teter, demanded that Carlson and Fox News retract their claims about Epps and put the network on notice of potential legal action. The lawyer set a March 31 deadline for a response to the letter but previously told The Washington Post that he did not receive one. “This lawsuit marks another moment of accountability for Fox News,” Teter said in a statement.Epps rose to attention on the right because of videos shot on Jan.
In a July 2022 segment of Carlson’s show, one of his guests, conservative commentator and former Trump White House speechwriter Darren Beattie, called Epps “the smoking gun of the entire fed-surrection,” a suggestion that Carlson did not rebut.Other Fox hosts also raised the topic. During an October 2021 segment of Laura Ingraham’s show, an on-screen graphic asked “Were Federal Assets Involved in Capitol Riot?” while the host talked about Epps’ role.
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