A U.S. District Court judge dismissed a wrongful termination suit filed by a Fox News producer who claimed he was fired in retaliation for calling out the network’s reporting on President Trump’s erroneous charges of 2020 election fraud and the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Jason Donner, who worked at the network’s Washington bureau as a reporter and producer, was fired on Sept. 28, 2022, two days after calling in sick. He was told he had been terminated for his absence.
In 2023, Donner filed a lawsuit in a Washington, D.C., court that contended his dismissal was linked to several instances in which he challenged the veracity of the network’s coverage.
But U.S. District Judge Amir Ali determined in his ruling issued Monday that Donner failed to meet the company rules and that his conduct was not protected by the District of Columbia’s sick leave law.
Donner’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit noted that Fox News bosses criticized the network’s journalists for not considering the feelings of its pro-Trump audience after the election that sent Joe Biden to the White House.
Those comments are supported by the depositions and evidence collected for the Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit against Fox News, which was settled in April for $787.5 million.
But Ali also said Donner was an at-will employee and that his case failed to identify “a public policy that precluded Fox from firing him over his ardent objections to the network’s programming, no matter their validity.”
The same point was raised when U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper dismissed that portion of Donner’s claim in 2024.
“As we have maintained, this lawsuit was entirely without merit, and we are pleased with the court’s ruling on the matter,” a Fox News representative said in a statement.
