On January 6, 2021, Arizona resident Ray Epps was in Washington. He had twice voted for Donald Trump and that day once again showed his loyalty to the silent president: he donned his red cap and followed the call for protests that ended with the attack on the Capitol.
In surviving videos of that day, the most notorious in recent history of American democracy, he is seen encouraging his companions to march on the Capitol. He also shows up after a while when things got ugly and tries to calm the crowd. There is no record of him, along with 2,500 insurgents, entering the building where Joe Biden’s victory in November’s election was confirmed, a victory Trump led his supporters, including Epps, to believe without any evidence the result of a huge electoral victory was voter fraud. Although judge after judge has ruled that no such deception ever took place, neither the former president nor many of his followers have broken from the swindle. Epps finally did it by force.
Tucker Carlson at a Fox studio in New York. Richard Drew (AP)
That emerges from the lawsuit its lawyers filed Wednesday against cable news network Fox News over the events that took place after that day, when conservative media star Tucker Carlson posted another hoax claiming that he had died on March 6. On January 1st, he was trafficked as an infiltrated US government agent to incite a revolt and thereby tarnish the image of Trump and his legion of supporters. Conspiracy theorists needed no further proof after seeing pictures taken on Jan. 5 of what appeared to be a group calling him “Fed!” (Abbreviation of “Federal Agent”) and others, from 6, in which he comes out and whispers something inaudible into the ear of another man in a red cap.
According to the complaint, the consequences of this malice were varied and long-lasting and far from over. The next chapter in this story will be written in the same courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware where the case was heard about the lies Fox and his associates knowingly spread about Dominion Voting Systems, a recounting machine company. That process was settled before it began by an out-of-court settlement and cost media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of the chain, $787.5 million. It has not yet been announced how much money Epps is asking for. And another counting company, Starmatic, is still pending its lawsuit.
The Fox News headquarters in Manhattan, in a picture taken last April. MIKE SEGAR (Portal)
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The fact that the Justice Department failed to hold Epps accountable for his actions that day, despite his participation in the riots at the time, a violent outburst that has led to him indicting more than a thousand people in federal court in Washington , led Carlson to the conclusion, repeated up to twenty times on the show, that there could only be one explanation: that he was an FBI envoy with specific instructions to provoke the protesters.
death threats
Before he was released in April as a result of the previous trial, Carlson was the most-watched cable television host in the United States and had a legion of believers willing to believe anything he told them. Some of these followers made life impossible for Epps and his wife Robyn, who, according to the complaint, harassed them with all sorts of threats, including death. That harassment, which included several companies marketing T-shirts bearing the slogan “Arrest Ray Epps,” forced them, the couple denounces, to close their bridal shop and move them from their home, a ranch, to the state to relocate to Arizona. . They now live in a trailer in a remote part of Utah.
“First Fox and his hosts searched [tras el ataque al Capitolio] the guilt mode [la organización izquierdista] Antifa,” the complaint reads. “As information about the rioters circulated, it became all too easy to disprove this untruth. (…) Fox knew it needed a January 6 scapegoat to break free and win over viewers. So they singled out Ray Epps and began to spread the lie that he was a federal agent who instigated the attack on the Capitol. These lies destroyed Ray and Robyn’s lives. But as Fox recently learned in its lawsuit against Dominion Voting Systems, those lies have consequences.”
In a January 2022 interview with the bipartisan congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, Epps recounted under oath the milestones of his life, which he spent mostly in Arizona save for a stint in Nevada, where he met his wife met and married. After flirting with the Tea Party, he became involved with the Oath Keepers militia, whose leaders received their harshest sentences yet on January 6, but left when he felt they were “too radical”. He was finally convinced of the voter fraud theory when he received ballots on his ranch in the names of three people who were neither he nor his wife. He had never heard those names in the twelve years he had owned the farm.
During this interrogation he confirmed that he had served as a Marine for four years; “Never with the security forces.” “And with the FBI?” the interrogator asks at some point. “No sir”.
Yes, he was, according to the text of the lawsuit, a loyal viewer of Fox, a chain he asked through his lawyer last March to retract the things that had been said about him on TV. Neither Carlson nor Fox News complied with this request. Both will now face each other in court if an out-of-court settlement does not prevent this.
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