Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary and Fox News are facing a defamation lawsuit from a pair of Utah nonprofits and their founders over O’Leary’s on-air claims that they worked for the Chinese Communist Party.
O’Leary made the remarks in May after residents pushed back on his plan to build a 40,000-acre data center in Utah, Politico reported. The Utah nonprofits, Alliance for a Better Utah and Elevate Strategies, allege O’Leary branded them “proxies for the Chinese government,” the complaint said.
O’Leary’s claims “spread like wildfire” and were “amplified by Fox,” the complaint added.
“Who would want us to stop building our electrical grid? Who would wanna stop us from having compute capacity to develop AI? Which adversary would want that? There’s only one. It’s China,” O’Leary said in a May X post, according to the complaint. “We noticed an immediate spike in misinformation on two platforms, Instagram and X, formerly Twitter. Why is this happening across America?”
The post has since been removed from X.
O’Leary made 10 additional appearances on Fox, where he alleged he received evidence from data scientists, according to Politico.
“[Fox] publicly corrected the record on every program where on-air guest Kevin O’Leary’s comments were made, all of which was extensively publicized,” Fox News Media told Politico. The outlet “will vigorously defend against this lawsuit.”
O’Leary, Alliance and Elevate each did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
“I was duped,” Republican Utah state Sen. Todd Weiler said in a June apology post on X. Weiler had shared O’Leary’s claim that China bankrolled critics of his proposed data center in Box Elder County, Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit in April 2023, after Dominion filed a $1.6 billion defamation claim in March 2021. The network allegedly damaged Dominion’s reputation by airing false allegations about its voting machines in the 2020 election.
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