By all appearances, lawyers representing the One America News Network — generally known as OAN — have been rather busy lately. A couple of weeks ago, for example, the far-right media outlet, facing a defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic, settled the case with the voting machine company.
Last summer, OAN and one of its on-air personalities also reportedly settled a defamation lawsuit brought by a former executive at Dominion Voting Systems.
OAN also settled a defamation lawsuit filed by Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, former election workers in Georgia who were targeted by Donald Trump and his followers with conspiratorial lies.
This week, the conspiratorial network appears to have settled yet another case. NBC News reported:
One America News Network retracted an article Monday that said former President Donald Trump’s onetime attorney Michael Cohen had an affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels.
It was about a month ago when OAN (which is sometimes referred to as OANN) published a report suggesting that Stormy Daniels’ former attorney, Michael Avenatti, had claimed that the porn star and Cohen had an affair. The same report claimed that Cohen and Daniels might have “cooked up” Trump’s hush-money scandal as part of some kind of pre-election extortion scheme.
None of this was true. Not only was there no affair, but Avenatti hadn’t even made the claim in the first place.
OAN said in a statement yesterday that it was pulling the story entirely. “To be clear, no evidence suggests that Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels were having an affair and no evidence suggests that Mr. Cohen ‘cooked up’ the scheme to extort the Trump Organization before the 2016 election,” the network conceded.
The statement went on to say, “This retraction is part of a settlement reached with Michael Cohen. The so-called whistleblower, Mr. Avenatti, has denied making the allegations. OAN apologizes to Mr. Cohen for any harm the publication may have caused him.”
It’s worth emphasizing for context that OAN retracted its report after Cohen hired a lawyer named Justin Nelson. You might not know that name, but you’re probably familiar with his work: As a New York Times report added, Nelson “represented Dominion Voting Systems in a suit against Fox News that cost that network $787.5 million to settle.”
It’s likely this captured the attention of OAN’s legal department.
As for the future, the Times’ report added, “OAN still faces a lawsuit from Dominion,” leaving open the possibility that we might yet see another settlement from the far-right network.
