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Wilmington, Delaware (CNN) Veteran mediator Jerry Roscoe received an urgent call as he celebrated his 70th birthday on Sunday on a relaxing river cruise from Budapest to Bucharest.
Opposite voices asked if Roscoe would act as arbitrator for 11 Hours in a large defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems. The trial began hours later, according to people familiar with the matter.
When Mr. Roscoe boarded a cruise ship, he didn’t hesitate to accept the unexpected task of brokering a deal to avoid the media law court of the century.
Roscoe told CNN on Wednesday, recalling the advice his father gave him when he was 16 about accepting a job assignment while on vacation. Then they called you and told me that if they needed you, you would go.”
The trial’s lead attorneys, Dominion’s Justin Nelson and Fox’s Dan Webb, had been in settlement talks over the weekend before Roscoe was brought in, but an agreement fell through because they were “fairly distant.” No, one of the people familiar with the matter said. He told CNN about this.
Attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems hold a press conference outside the Newcastle County Courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware, Tuesday, April 18, 2023, following the settlement of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News. . (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
The next day, Roscoe went through thousands of pages of documents, familiarizing himself with historical defamation cases. Then there was an intensive “shuttle diplomacy” with Roscoe swaying between his two sides, culminating in calls and Zoom meetings with everyone.
Late Sunday night, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis was informed that both parties had hired Roscoe, so he called the start of the trial a surprising day to give the mediator a chance to seal the deal. We announced it would be delayed, but he didn’t seem interested in allowing additional delays beyond that.
On Monday, the desperate negotiations began.
In the whirlwind of 24 hours that followed, negotiations culminated in a historic deal, which was launched shortly after 2:00 p.m. evaded the trial. The election is a televised lie in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
Roscoe admitted to CNN that he had “broken down.”
In addition to Roscoe, CNN spoke with several people with first-hand knowledge of what led up to the $787.5 million out-of-court deal. As part of the agreement, Fox also “acknowledged” a court finding that it repeatedly aired false claims about Dominion.
Fox News attorney Dan Webb (left) and Dominion Voting Systems attorney Justin Nelson (right).
Leading up to the last-minute deal, lawyers for both Fox News and Dominion fully expected a trial to take place.
Last week, the Dominion notified Fox News that one of its first witnesses would be 92-year-old Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.Fox News 8 pm Radical Tucker Carlson, who hosts Time, was one of the first people the Dominion planned to take on the witness stand in Wilmington, Delaware.
And after the jury was sworn in on Tuesday morning, all signs indicated the trial would go ahead as planned. During his lunch break, he was seen eating at a Subway restaurant in the courthouse’s basement cafeteria. The newly empowered jurors also ate their first and only court-provided lunch. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Roscoe was finally finalizing a deal to avoid his six-week trial.
“Being in court tends to flesh out the risk-benefit focus of litigation,” Roscoe told CNN. “When a jury sits and watches people trying to decide your fate, it’s a wake-up experience.”
Talk of the settlement reached new heights on Tuesday afternoon when opening statements scheduled for 1:30 p.m. were inexplicably delayed and jurors were not returned to court as scheduled.
After the deal closed at 2:00 p.m., the attorneys quickly drew up the paperwork, which was signed just before Davis entered court before 4:00 p.m.
Davis then announced that a settlement had been reached, startling observers and drawing audible gasps from reporters inside the court.
Reaching an agreement was not easy. Roscoe, a world-famous mediator who settled wartime disputes in the Balkans, said it was one of the most difficult tasks he had ever faced, he told CNN.
“Because of the size and visibility of the dispute, it was one of the more difficult cases,” he said, adding, “I wouldn’t characterize any aspect of this mediation as easy.”
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