Fox News Called It a Stunt. Gavin Newsom Sent the Bill.

A $787 million libel suit, in the key of Dominion.

Jun 27, 2025

It must be something more than coincidence—something bordering on ritual—that $787 million has emerged as the price of telling lies in prime time. It was the sum Rupert Murdoch’s empire once paid to bury the truth about voting machines, and now it appears again as Gavin Newsom’s asking price in his new lawsuit against Fox News. One gets the sense that Newsom isn’t merely suing for libel. He’s summoning a sacrament. If lies are to be told under the lights, let them be gilded, televised, and dearly paid for.

At the center of the suit lies a single phone call—rather, the insinuation of one that never happened. In the days following Trump’s deployment of Marines and National Guard forces to Los Angeles, Newsom publicly condemned the action. Trump, never one to waste a good crisis, welcomed the optics of urban upheaval—not to quell them, but to sanctify his own intervention under the Insurrection Act. He later claimed the California governor had called him days afterward to thank him for the intervention. Jesse Watters of Fox News aired the clip, leaned on it, edited it, and helped launder it into fact. But the call logs, inconveniently, show no such thing. The only presidential contact, Newsom’s office confirms, came on June 6—hours before federal boots hit downtown—and it was a protest, not a plea.

The implications here are not about calendar accuracy. They are about rewriting the choreography of power. Trump wanted the optics of civilian gratitude after a military occupation of an American city. Watters, ever eager to swap evidence for innuendo, stitched that illusion together with a soundbite and a smirk. What followed was less a broadcast than a communiqué to the faithful: your enemies will bow, even if we have to invent it. The lawsuit, filed in Delaware Superior Court, alleges exactly that—that Fox acted with “actual malice” and peddled falsehoods to discredit Newsom and gild the gold on Trump’s throne.

The legal complaint is neither frivolous nor unprecedented. It echoes the Dominion case not just in dollar figure but in structure: fabricated narrative, reckless dissemination, political motive, corporate megaphone. But unlike Dominion, Newsom is not a company with a balance sheet to salvage. He is a sitting governor—possibly measuring the White House drapes—and his public credibility is the asset in question. In choosing to sue, he does not merely want a retraction. He wants to impose cost. “If Fox News wants to lie to the American people on Donald Trump’s behalf,” he told Politico in a statement, “it should face consequences.”

That language—on Donald Trump’s behalf—is doing some heavy lifting. Because this is not merely about a defamation tort. It is about a closed-loop system of narrative manufacture, where a rogue executive rewrites events while the ink is still wet and a network of courtiers enshrines it as gospel. The most dangerous thing about Trump’s false account is not that it was a lie, but that it metastasized into memory before it could be corrected. The suit, late though it may seem, is less a legal maneuver than a moral autopsy.

Fox, for its part, has called the lawsuit a “transparent publicity stunt,” and promises to “defend the case vigorously.” It’s the rhetorical equivalent of killing your parents, then appealing for sympathy as an orphan—Fox calling reputational harm a grievance in a scandal of its own invention. But then, Fox, as ever, confuses the right to speak with the right to deceive—without consequence. They are not the same thing, and even the First Amendment, when properly read, never suggested otherwise. What’s different now is that Newsom—unlike most Democrats with spines made of straw—is calling their bluff.

There is, of course, the practical question: will the courts treat this claim with the gravity it deserves, or will it vanish into the same judicial purgatory where truth and timeline go to die? Perhaps that’s why Newsom’s lawyers include the same firm that once dismantled Alex Jones—a kind of surgical message to Fox: we’ve done this before. And if the goal is less to win than to drag the corpse of credibility back into the light, then perhaps this is what accountability looks like in a post-factual age. Not truth from the anchor’s chair, but damages rendered by the bench.

We are no longer in the era of accidental error or editorial lapse. We are watching the monetization of fiction as it calcifies into consensus—a model in which reputations are reduced to scenery, facts to clay, and the truth to whatever survives the chyron. If Newsom prevails, it will be less a legal victory than a symbolic one. But symbols matter, especially in an empire that traffics in illusion. The penalty is the point. Let the price of the lie be exacted at the going rate: $787 million—payable, as always, in installments of shame.