Fox News Still Suffering Tucker Hangover As Ray Epps — Who Is NOT A Fed — Sues For Defamation
Don't ya just hate it when the leopards eat your face?
On Monday, Ray Epps filed a defamation suit against Fox News.
If you are scratching your head and wondering who the hell that is, CONGRATULATIONS on your excellent mental hygiene. What's it like to live a charmed existence, blissfully unplagued by the wave of sewage flooding the nation every night?
Here in hell, Ray Eppsplayed a central role in rightwing conspiracies for upwards of a year after traveling to DC to participate in the January 6 Capitol Riot and getting crosswise with rightwing media grifter Timothy Gionet, AKA "Baked Alaska." In his pleading, Epps says that he left his hotel on the evening of January 5 after hearing that Trump supporters were "becoming confrontational with police and Black Lives Matter protestors" in hopes of de-escalating the situation because “Marines are always in the front.”
When Epps arrived at the scene, a half dozen or so Trump supporters among a larger group were yelling at police and highly agitated. The lead provocateur was someone Epps would later learn called himself Baked Alaska.
Epps engaged with Baked Alaska, who, unbeknownst to Epps, was livestreaming the encounter—his regular modus operandi. Based on his observations of Baked Alaska that night, Epps believed Baked Alaska was seeking to incite violence against the police, calling the officers names and telling them and the crowd that the police had broken their oath. Epps challenged him, telling Baked Alaska and the crowd that attacks on the police and violence were not what their effort was about. As Baked Alaska began to turn the crowd of a dozen or so Trump supporters against him, Epps sought to prove that he was on their side so that he could deescalate the situation—to find common ground with them. He said, “I’m probably gonna go to jail for this. Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol. Peacefully.” At that time, Epps believed that the Rotunda was open to the public, like it had been when he visited Washington, DC with his father a decade earlier. Nevertheless, Baked Alaska responded by chanting “Fed, fed, fed,” which a few others in the crowd joined.
The next day, Epps was present when the barricades were breached at the Capitol, although he claims he was trying to calm the situation. In his telling, when the FBI posted his photograph as a person of interest after the attack, he immediately contacted the agency and cleared the whole thing up. But then in October of 2021, in his Patriot Purge special, Tucker Carlson started flogging a storyline that Epps was a federal agent provocateur, riling up the poor, innocent Trump supporters in an effort to discredit their movement. And he kept flogging it more or less right up until he, Carlson, was fired in April of 2023.
It should be noted that Epps is not and has never been a federal agent. He's actually a former Oath Keeper who fervently believed all the insane shit about a stolen election that Trump and his minions at Fox had been shoveling. But Carlson had a storyline to sell, and by God he was going to sell it, evidence be damned. As his former producer Abby Grossberg alleged in her own recently settled employment discrimination suit against Fox, Carlson concocted the conclusion that government agents incited the crowd, and then told her to find proof of it. His preferred vector would have been a lawyer for one of the Proud Boy defendants, but lacking that, he turned instead to former Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie, who managed to get himself fired from the Trump White House for being too racist back in 2017 when such a thing was still possible. Beattie authored several posts placing Epps at the center of an FBI plot for the wingnut outlet Revolver .
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As intended, the story deflecting blame onto the feds went viral with Fox's audience, with Reps. Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene leading the charge in the House, and Senator Ted Cruz running point in the Senate.
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According to his complaint, Epps and his wife became the targets of violent threats and harassment at the hands of their fellow MAGA travelers. They lost their wedding venue business in Arizona, and had to sell their house and move out of state to a trailer. And so now they're seeking unspecified damages from Fox for defamation and the tort of portraying them in a false light.
Epps alleges that Carlson was at a minimum reckless as to the veracity of his claims, and even that he had actual knowledge of their falsity, since House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave him all the tapes from January 6, including bodycam footage from cops at the barricade, showing Epps trying to calm the crowd. And prior to that, Epps testified to the House January 6 Select Committee, which put out multiple statements debunking the hoax. This only prompted Carlson to double down, accusing the committee of covering up the FBI's involvement.
For instance, on January 6, 2023, Carlson celebrated the two-year anniversary of the riot with yet another segment attacking Epps:
"The question is, did Ray Epps work or have any contact with any government agency? Did he talk about January 6th before it happened with any employee of the US government? We don’t know. We do know that two years after January 6th, long after an awful lot of other people have gone to jail for walking around the Capitol building, Ray Epps is still a free man. He’s never been charged, much less imprisoned in solitary confinement like so many others. Why is that? Well, let’s just stop lying. At this point, it’s pretty obvious why that is. But, of course, they’re still lying about it."
Then on March 11, he said:
"A lot of this was clearly influenced by federal agents or informants. It was, okay? But I did not want to suggest someone was a federal agent or informant unless I knew for a fact because you really could get someone in trouble. Right? If you’re like, this was the guy, and like, we don’t know. I do know for, I mean it’s very clear, something very strange is going on with Ray Epps, we’ve named him repeatedly, we’ve invited him on the show repeatedly, I mean don’t lie to my face, the Ray Epps thing isn’t, isn’t organic, sorry."
That is the kind of shit which just cost Fox $787 million, plus tens of millions more to pay their lawyers for a year of embarrassing discovery in the Dominion Voting Systems case. That discovery will now fuel the defamation suit filed by Dominion's competitor Smartmatic. Indeed, Epps himself relies on the Dominion discovery for his claim that Fox had a commercial incentive to defame him as part of an effort to win back viewers "to advance an inherently improbable story in order to aggrandize Fox with viewers who were disgruntled with Fox for not standing sufficiently loyal to President Trump" and "to deflect responsibility from Fox’s own complicity in the January 6 violence." And that's not the only thing Epps shares with Dominion: He's also represented by Brian and Michael Farnan, two of the lawyers who represented the voting machine company.
All of this is very, very bad for Fox. Which is not to say that Epps is some kind of hero — he's clearly not that. But, being liberals, we understand that two things can be true at once .
But now for something unambiguously terrible ...
Oh, and PS, Epps says that the FBI informed him in May of 2023 that it does intend to charge him after all. Naturally Epps blames Fox for this, too, writing, "The relentless attacks by Fox and Mr. Carlson and the resulting political pressure likely resulted in the criminal charges."
The wanking motion is implied.
[ Epps v. Fox News Network, LLC , Docket via Court Listener]
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