Enlarge/ Sidney Powell, flanked by Rudy Giuliani, at a press conference on Nov. 19, three days before the Trump campaign publicly cut ties with her.
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Dominion Voting Systems has filed a suit against former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell, alleging that her widespread, unfounded conspiracy theories led to both reputational damage to the company and death threats against its employees. Dominion is seeking $1.3 billion in damages.
Statements made by Powell, “in concert with allies and media outlets” presenting a “false preconceived narrative” about the 2020 election, caused “unprecedented harm” to Dominion, the company said in its suit (PDF).
Powell is the attorney who filed the “kraken” lawsuits seeking to de-certify the results of the 2020 election. The Trump campaign abruptly cut ties with Powell in late November, but that stopped neither her increasingly outrageous claims nor her increasingly ludicrous lawsuits from flowing. Not only were Powell’s suits based on unfounded conspiracy theories, but they were also just plain bad filings in myriad other ways, including naming locations that didn’t exist, misspelling ones that did, and naming plaintiffs who had not agreed to participate in the case.
There has been no occurrence or proof of widespread voter fraud in any state, but that has not stopped Trump allies from continuing to make false claims that the election was in some way “rigged.”
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“Powell’s wild accusations are demonstrably false,” Dominion writes in the suit. “Far from being created in Venezuela to rig elections for a now-deceased Venezuelan dictator, Dominion was founded in Toronto for the purpose of creating a fully auditable paper-based vote system that would empower people with disabilities to vote independently on paper ballots.”
Among her many questionable assertions, Powell claimed in November that Dominion was “created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez,” who died in 2013.
Dominion first warned back in December that it was planning defamation lawsuits, as it sent more than 20 letters to individuals and organizations, including Powell, demanding that they stop making defamatory claims about the company. Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN were all on the receiving end of Dominion’s warnings, as were Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Maria Bartiromo; Newsmax host Greg Kelly; attorney Lin Wood; and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, among others.
Because of their defamatory claims, Dominion alleges, the company has had to spend more than $565,000 on private security forces for its employees since the election. An employee for the company filed a defamation suit against the Trump campaign, as well as Giuliani and Powell, in December in Colorado. That suit alleges that such false claims had led to the Dominion employee receiving death threats and going into hiding.