Barely a year after its bombshell settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News Channel appeared to be heading for another defamation suit.
Mauricio Garcia, a 36-year-old man in Texas, sued the network in April for allegedly misidentifying him as a mass shooter. He also sued Newsmax, Univision, and several others.
However, the network scored a big victory on Thursday after the plaintiff removed Fox News from the list of defendants.
Garcia, unfortunately, shares the same name as one of 2023’s deadliest murderers: Dallas resident Mauricio Martinez Garcia, killed during last year’s rampage at the age of 33.
The living Garcia saw his photo plastered all over news reports about the shooting. In a suit filed in Austin, he accused the news outlets of “recklessly disregarded basic journalistic safeguards” by posting “the photo of an innocent man, branding him as a neo-Nazi murderer to his local community and the nation at large.”
However, Fox’s lawyers took issue with the lack of evidence against the network. More specifically, the lawyers said that Garcia’s case cited an unrelated TikTok, not a story from the Fox News website.
“Thus, the image on which Plaintiff bases his claim is taken from a TikTok within a TikTok — and neither TikTok is an [Fox News] account,” the lawyers reportedly wrote in their motion to dismiss.
Garcia’s lawyer Mark Bankston responded Thursday and conceded.
“My client Mauricio Garcia has voluntarily dismissed his claims against Fox News with prejudice. I acknowledge the lawsuit should never have been filed against Fox News, and we are compensating Fox News for its trouble in defending against this claim,” he wrote.
“To my prior public statements, Fox News did not ignore basic journalistic precautions and did have proper institutional guardrails in place with respect to its coverage of the Allen, TX shooting.”
Plaintiffs and defendants often settle defamation suits out of court, as in the case of Dominion’s suit against Fox. That way, neither party sees its dirty laundry dragged into a courtroom.
In this case, though, the plaintiff simply dismissed the suit.
Garcia’s team is still suing eight other outlets, including Newsmax.
Bankston has been posting on Twitter to narrate the saga.
Take a look —
If you want to learn more about the case, it is Cause No. D-1-GN-24-001946, pending in the 455thDistrict Court of Travis County.
— Mark Bankston (@BankstonAtLaw) June 20, 2024