Fox News faces another potentially ruinous threat over its coverage of Jan. 6 insurrection

Fox News faces another potentially ruinous legal threat related to its coverage of the 2020 election.

Former host Tucker Carlson promoted a debunked conspiracy theory on his since-canceled prime-time program about Donald Trump supporter Ray Epps, who was seen on camera Jan. 6, 2021, urging a crowd to march into the U.S. Capitol with him. Legal experts now say the Arizona man has a strong defamation case against the conservative network, reported the New York Times.

“His challenge is to get a judge, if he files the suit, to say this was so inherently, bizarrely improbable that only a reckless person would put it into circulation,” said Vermont Law School president Rodney Smolla, a defamation expert who consulted for Dominion during its own lawsuit against Fox News. “No case is easy, but this one is certainly, in my view, viable.”

Carlson repeatedly told viewers the lack of charges against Epps, who voted for the former president twice, was proof that he was a secret government agent who “helped stage-manage the insurrection," and the Marine Corps veteran and his wife were forced to sell their ranch and wedding venue business and go into hiding after receiving death threats from conspiracy theorists.

Epps and his attorneys are proceeding with plans to sue the network, which recently settled the Dominion Voting Systems case for $787.5 million over claims made by broadcasters about its equipment used in the 2020 election and still faces a similar lawsuit from the voting technology company Smartmatic.

“We informed Fox in March that if they did not issue a formal on-air apology that we would pursue all available avenues to protect the Eppses’ rights,” said Epps attorney Michael Teter, who sent the network a cease-and-desist letter asking for an on-air apology and a retraction that have not yet been issued. “That remains our intent.”