The Governor of California fired shots at Fox News amid his bombshell lawsuit against the network for allegedly misrepresenting his calls with President Donald Trump as riots raged in Los Angeles.
“I’m not someone who litigates, I’m not someone who would typically jump on something like this,” Gavin Newsom told YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen. “But it was so blatant, it was so gratuitous that I felt compelled to push back against this propaganda network.”
He added he’d be willing to dismiss his claim if Fox were to admit it was at fault and publicly apologize. “I mean it’s simple: just apologize and give [the apology] as much air time [as] when you weaponized the lie,” he said.
Newsom filed his complaint Friday after Fox News anchor Jesse Watters repeatedly claimed the governor had lied about the timeline of his calls to Trump during the anti-ICE protests in California’s largest city earlier this month.
As the demonstrations mounted, Trump and Newsom shared a call late on the night of Friday, June 6 to discuss Trump’s threats of sending in the National Guard. Trump subsequently stated they had spoken on June 9, which Newsom said was not true.
Newsom’s lawyers are now arguing that producers on Watters’ program deliberately and misleadingly edited videos to support the host’s statements backing the president’s version of events.
Newsom is seeking $787.5 million in damages, identical to the settlement paid by Fox to Dominion Voting Systems after a separate, 2023 defamation suit concerning claims the 2020 election was stolen.
“I’ve never seen something so blatant,” Newsom told Cohen of his own case. “It’s one thing to assert, it’s one thing to omit, it’s another to see a news organization knowingly and willfully lying and manipulating the facts and defaming someone.”
Fox News has responded by suggesting Newsom’s suit is a “transparent publicity stunt.” In a statement quoted by The New York Times, the network further described the claim as “frivolous and designed to chill free speech critical of him,” and they promised to “defend this case vigorously” in court.
