Powell previously wrote on social media that she would not be “portraying anything”.
Dominion Voting Systems filed a libel lawsuit against attorney Sidney Powell on Friday for what they say is their role in orchestrating a “proven false” conspiracy theory about the Colorado-based electronic voting machine handling the 2020 presidential election. .
“She directly accused Dominion of fraud, electoral fraud, bribery and conspiracy, which are serious crimes,” wrote the company in its complaint filed in DC’s federal court. “Powell’s statements exposed Dominion to the most extreme hatred and contempt.”
The lawsuit, which seeks nearly $ 1.3 billion in damages, accuses Powell of leading a comprehensive campaign to spread false electoral theories that have gained popularity with President Donald Trump. A former federal prosecutor, Powell became a close adviser to Trump in the last days of his presidency, meeting him repeatedly as he made increasingly desperate attempts to overturn the result of an election he lost by more than 7 million votes. .
Powell could not be reached for comment. But after the electronic voting machine wrote to her last month threatening a lawsuit, she wrote on social media that “it wouldn’t take anything away. We have # evidence They are # masters of fraud!”
The Dominion lawsuit hits at a time when those who were insistently promoting false allegations of electoral fraud saw an intensified setback on several fronts. Lawyer Lin Wood, who has partnered with Powell in several of the lawsuits, has had his Twitter account permanently banned from the social media platform “for violating the Twitter Rules,” a Twitter spokesman confirmed to ABC News on Friday. market. Wood was not found by ABC News at his law firm for comment.
Rudy Giuliani, another central lawyer in the Trump allies’ campaign to make false allegations about the election, is facing fresh scrutiny for his comments calling for “combat” during the January 6 rally that precipitated the violent US Capitol uprising he left five people killed.
Giuliani defended his comments on social media, saying his “cause is to get an honest vote and end electoral fraud before it becomes a permanent tactic of the media-enabled and protected Democratic Party”.
To fuel the rage at the rally were the theories unmasked of a rigged election. This included the false allegations about Dominion voting machines that were pushed relentlessly into the courts, on social media and in Trump’s public statements as part of the effort to overturn the election results. In his 124-page complaint, Dominion details how theories spread like wildfire in conservative media and social media. In several cases, Trump tweeted theories and reports about the company to his 88 million followers.
“While Powell assured the audience during television and radio appearances that his claims were supported by ‘evidence’, Powell’s ‘evidence’ included statements by a heterogeneous group of conspiracy theorists, con artists, armchair ‘experts’ and anonymous sources who have been judicially determined to be ‘totally unreliable’, ”Dominion wrote in his complaint.
Some of Powell’s most elaborate theories claim that the company was created in Venezuela by the late dictator Hugo Chávez, the complaint said.
Dominion wrote in his complaint that, as a result of the defamatory falsehoods sold by Powell – in conjunction with allies and media outlets who were determined to promote a preconceived false narrative – the founder of Dominion, the employees of Dominion, the governor of Georgia and the Georgia The secretary of state was harassed and received death threats, and Dominion suffered enormous damage.
The lawsuit marks the beginning of what could be a violent attack of litigation against the president and his allies in response to an aggressive attempt to overturn the results of the November election.
In the past few weeks, Dominion has sent formal letters to more than a dozen others, including Giuliani, White House adviser Pat Cippilone and Fox News, asking them to withdraw their statements and preserve documents in preparation for “impending” litigation.
Some conservative outlets, including Fox News and Newsmax, in the past few weeks have started to release retractions to retract their previous reports on Dominion as the threat approached. Powell, however, said he would “double” his claims and continued to promote these conspiracies during interviews on TV and social media.
Dominion also did not rule out the possibility of suing Trump himself for his role in spreading theories about the company.
“We are deliberately looking at the statements and actions of everyone who was involved in the Dominion talks. No one was ruled out,” Tom Clare, Dominion’s lawyer, said on Friday during a call with reporters.
Lucien Bruggeman and Ali Dukakis of ABC News contributed to this report.