I hate to say I told you so, but … no, wait, I love to say I told you so. After many months of public and private legal wrangling, the defamation trial of the century ended not with a bang, but with a settlement:

Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems said Tuesday that they have reached a settlement agreement just moments before opening arguments were set to begin.

The deal ends a monthslong legal battle over whether the media company had defamed the voting machine maker when they broadcast election conspiracy theories in 2020.

The terms of the settlement were not immediately available.

The jury had barely been seated when the settlement coalesced. I predicted as much in the Headlines yesterday:

Lawsuits like these are often games of chicken, and sometimes it takes seating a jury to get both sides to seriously consider the collision. It may not work, but I’d bet the judge wants to push both sides into swerving — and the attorneys will likely prefer the certainty of a settlement over the uncertainty of juries and appellate rulings in a case like this.

As I’ve also predicted, any settlement would have to include some declaration by Fox that their claims about Dominion were false. Aaaaand … presto:

“We are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

Emphasis mine. What did Fox get out of it? Welllll …

Judge Davis did not say anything about the terms of the settlement. But among the consequences: the public will not see Rupert Murdoch testify in open court. Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo and other potential witnesses also will not appear.

In other words, Fox News got a frickin’ valuable outcome from a settlement. The terms have yet to be disclosed, and may not ever be officially published. One can bet that the dollar figure Dominion got out of this will be in the eight figures, at least. Whatever Fox paid, it was worth it to them to keep from having hostile attorneys questioning their execs and on-air talent, under oath.

Could Fox News have won in a trial? I suspect they had a pretty good chance of prevailing under the Sullivan standard requiring “actual malice” for defamation of “public persons.” But the trial and testimony could have done enormous damage to the organization regardless, which is why a settlement was always a safe bet. It’s one thing to spend the pretrial period playing chicken in a PR fight. Once the jury got seated, matters came down to the bottom line — as is often the case in lawsuits.

One does have to wonder whether Fox News plans to settle a parallel case with Smartmatic as a way to “reflect[] FOX’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards,” especially now that they have stipulated that “certain claims” about the Stop the Steal argument were “false.” Stay tuned on that point to see whether it will take another round of PR chicken and subpoenas to get to an “amicable” settlement there, too.

Update: My prediction on the payment was off by an order of magnitude:

#BREAKING Fox News settles defamation case for $787.5 mn: Dominion lawyer pic.twitter.com/KTDAHOZzkS

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) April 18, 2023

That’s one expensive settlement. That alone tells us all we need to know about how confident Fox was about prevailing, even under the Sullivan standard.

More from Dominion’s CEO, who refused to back down:

BREAKING: Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos calls settlement with Fox News "historic," adding: "Fox has admitted to telling lies about Dominion that caused enormous damage to my company… nothing can ever make up for that." https://t.co/0hppoGCI1J pic.twitter.com/6ieXrHXEGL

— ABC News (@ABC) April 18, 2023

Update: The amount of this settlement really does look like an admission that Fox new it was going to lose and lose big at trial. This is almost half of what Dominion sought from the lawsuit, after all. Fox clearly calculated their risk as higher than the settlement amount.

With that in mind, what does this say about the “stop the steal” argument? It certainly makes it look false, at a minimum. That may well have some impact on the GOP nomination fight going forward.