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The former Fox News producer, who claims the right-wing network coerced him into making the false statements, has backed his own lawsuit against the company adding CEO Suzanne Scott as a defendant and Fox's attorneys against accusations of reading and deleting his phone messages.
In a lawsuit filed last month, Abby Grossberg alleges that Fox's lawyers encouraged her to defend her network and broadcast identity in her testimony in the Dominion Voting Systems case.
Grossberg now accuses Scott of complicity in the alleged coercion, according to his amended complaint.
Fox News previously stated that its lawsuits were "full of false accusations" and that its attorneys had never acted improperly.
The network fired Grossberg after he launched a legal battle.
Grossberg worked for Maria Bartiromo during the 2020 election cycle, and some of the comments about Bartiromo's show were at the heart of Dominion v. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Fox, where jury selection begins Thursday in Delaware. The network claims never to have defamed Dominion and that the Dominion lawsuit undermines freedom of the press in the United States.
In an amended lawsuit filed this week, Grossberg accused Fox's lawyers of deleting messages from his phone. The lawsuit alleges that Grossberg turned over his phone to Fox attorneys in 2022 and “that some communications between Ms. Grossberg and Ms. Bartiromo were lost/appear to have been deleted” when he received the device from the Fox team.
The issue of potentially lost or hidden evidence was raised in the Dominion case. On Wednesday, a judge sanctioned Fox for withholding a key Dominion recording: an on-air audio recording of Bartiromo's conversations with Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
© Courtesy of CNN Maria Bartiromo gears up for recording in 2018. — Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Fox said it never withheld evidence from Dominion, and Fox's attorneys told the court Wednesday they only learned Grossberg took the tape after he mentioned it in his lawsuit in recent weeks.
Commenting on Grossberg's new allegations, a Fox spokesperson said in a statement: "As our attorneys explained in court, we learned on March 20 from Grossberg's errata sheet that the relevant audio recordings may be available for the first time." Our attorneys then obtained access to Grossberg's telephone forensic images and reviewed the recordings made within 15 days of their becoming known."
Dominion has announced it will call Grossberg as a witness in the case against Fox News.
Fox News CEO Scott is expected to testify in court.
Emails released into the Dominion case reveal that in 2020 Scott said it was "bad for business" for a Fox News reporter to refute Donald Trump's false claims that the presidential election was rigged. (Fox News said the email was taken out of context by Dominion in a court filing.)
Scott also received an email from Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch condemning Trump's election refusal and blaming Trump for the January 6 riots.
— CNN's Oliver Darcy contributed to this story.
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