How Hard Lines in Fox-Dominion Deal Talks Suddenly Softened

On Tuesday morning, as the legal team for Dominion Voting Systems walked from their hotel to the courthouse where they were about to finish jury selection, one lawyer turned to another and asked in a low voice about a possible settlement, “Is there anything going on?”

“No, not really,” the other replied. They loaded their slide deck into the courtroom’s audiovisual system and steeled themselves for opening statements.

An 11th-hour deal in their billion-dollar defamation suit against Fox News seemed dead, with talks between the two sides having gone nowhere.

One of Dominion’s biggest asks was a nonstarter for Fox: a public apology from the network for its role in implicating Dominion in a fictitious, algorithmically driven scheme to steal the 2020 election from Donald J. Trump. Fox’s insistence on no admission of wrongdoing at all was a nonstarter for Dominion. The two companies, whose lawyers had exchanged dollar amounts over the weekend, were also far apart on a settlement number.

But in a conference room down the hall from Judge Eric M. Davis’s courtroom in downtown Wilmington, Del., representatives for both sides weren’t giving up. In the room were the Dominion chief executive, John Poulos, and one of his top investors, the Staple Street Capital co-founder Hootan Yaghoobzadeh.

Representing Fox, in a call from Los Angeles, was its chief legal officer, Viet Dinh — a close lieutenant of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Also calling in was a seasoned mediator whom both sides had brought in only 24 hours earlier — a veteran of wartime negotiations in the Balkans in the 1990s who was on a Danube River cruise with his wife.