Fox News channel and its parent company, 21st Century Fox, on Monday filed a motion to either dismiss or move to arbitration a lawsuit alleging that employees with the news network worked with the White House to push a conspiracy theory about a murdered Democratic National Committee staffer.
Rod Wheeler, a contributor for the network, filed the lawsuit alleging that Fox News had defamed him by misquoting him in a story about the DNC staffer, Seth Rich. Wheeler said that a reporter for the network misquoted him in a story claiming that Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks, which published internal emails stolen from the DNC. Fox News later retracted the story without much explanation.
In the filing submitted on Monday, lawyers for Fox insisted that Wheeler was not misquoted.
“He made substantially the same statements on the air in several on-camera interviews, before and after the Fox News report, and even stated publicly that the article he now challenges as false ‘was essentially correct and worthy of further investigation,'” they wrote in the filing.
Wheeler alleged in his lawsuit that he was pressured to help with the story. He further claimed that the White House wanted the story published, and that he was coached to tout the story on air and push the narrative that Russia was not involved in the DNC hack.
Wheeler also claimed Fox discriminated against him based on his race, which the network also pushed back on in its Monday filing. Wheeler did not offer “the facts necessary to support such a charge, because there are no such facts,” Fox argued.
The network also said that Wheeler had an obligation to pursue his claims in the lawsuit through arbitration. Fox argued in the filing that if the court does not agree to move the suit to arbitration, it should dismiss the lawsuit altogether.
Read the motion below:
Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly described Wheeler as a former Fox News contributor. Wheeler remains a contributor to the network.
