Former Trump supporter's January 6 defamation lawsuit against Fox News tossed by federal judge

United States District Judge Jennifer L. Hall granted the right-wing network’s motion to dismiss Ray Epps’s case

The man at the center of unhinged January 6 “false flag” conspiracy theories trumpeted by MAGA media, including Tucker Carlson, has had his defamation lawsuit against Fox News thrown out of court.

United States District Judge Jennifer L. Hall granted the right-wing network’s motion to dismiss Ray Epps’s case on Wednesday, agreeing that he had failed to prove that Fox News had committed “actual malice” against him.

The dismissal of Epps’s defamation suit against Fox News follows the conservative cable giant’s victory in similar cases recently brought by former Biden disinformation chief Nina Jankowicz and Hunter Biden “whistleblower” Tony Bobulinski. These victories come on the heels of the network settling a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over airing 2020 election lies for a historic $787 million.

“Following the dismissals of the Jankowicz, Bobulinski, and now Epps cases, FOX News is pleased with these back-to-back decisions from federal courts preserving the press freedoms of the First Amendment,” Fox News Media said in a statement to The Independent.

Epps’s attorney Michael Teter declined to comment.

Ray Epps at the Capitol riots on January 6 (AP)

After an insurrectionist mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop President Joe Biden’s electoral certification on January 6, 2021, Epps soon became a magnet for a bevy of baseless claims that he was working with the FBI to incite the riots and entrap Trump supporters.

Fueling these suspicions was the fact that Epps, who was present at the January 6 attack but did not enter the Capitol, was not initially charged with a crime, prompting many far-right media personalities to claim he was an agent provocateur whom federal prosecutors were protecting. Eventually, these theories were echoed by Republican members of Congress and made their way to Carlson’s then-primetime Fox News show. (The Department of Justice has called these claims “ludicrous” and a “disservice” to federal agents.)

Taking aim at Epps repeatedly on his show, Carlson — who had led the conservative media charge in January 6 revisionism — said there is “no rational explanation” why this “mysterious figure” who “helped stage-manage the insurrection” had not yet been charged. Notably, federal prosecutors eventually charged Epps for his participation in the riots and he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor last year, receiving one year of probation.

Epps, a one-time fervent Trump supporter and “loyal” Fox News viewer, said his life had essentially been “destroyed” by the conspiracy theories of him helping the fed concoct a “false flag” on January 6. Finally, he sent a cease-and-desist letter to Fox News in March 2023 demanding Carlson deliver a “formal on-air apology” and retract the “lies” he promoted on his program.

Carlson, meanwhile, was fired by Fox News a week after the Dominion settlement and a month after Epps sent the apology demand.

The letter was followed up four months later by a lawsuit, in which Epps claimed that “Fox repeatedly published defamatory falsehoods about Epps, including by broadcasting and rebroadcasting defamatory statements by Tucker Carlson who devoted over two dozen segments to Epps and by republishing those falsehoods” across its platforms.

In the end, though, the judge in this case did not feel that Epps’s complaint made the case that the network engaged in “actual malice” against him.

In its motion to dismiss, Fox News argued that the lawsuit should be “dismissed for failure to state a claim,” noting that Epps had become a “limited purpose public figure” due to his involvement in the Capitol riots and that Carlson’s “statements did not have precise meaning or convey objectively verifiable facts.”