A settlement has been reached between the Gateway Pundit and two Georgia poll workers who accused the St. Louis-based far-right website of defamation in a civil suit in St. Louis Circuit Court.
Notice of the settlement was filed Monday afternoon. The parties to the dispute “provide notice to the court that the parties have reached agreement to settle all claims and counterclaims asserted in the … action, which settlement shall be satisfied on March 29, 2025,” the notice reads.
“The parties respectfully request that this court vacate the trial date set in this matter,” the notice continues, “and stay this matter until March 29, 2025, at which point the parties will dismiss this matter pending satisfaction of the terms of the Parties’ settlement agreement.”
The terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
A representative of the legal team working for the two poll workers wrote in an email that the settlement offers “mutual satisfaction” and is “fair and reasonable.” The poll workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, could not be reached.
Jonathan Burns, the St. Louis-based lawyer for Jim Hoft, the Gateway Pundit’s owner, did not immediately respond to a request for a comment.
In June, 2022, the two women provided emotional testimony to the House Select Committee Investigating the January 6th Attack on the Capitol about the harassment, including death threats, that had resulted from false allegations they had committed voter fraud on behalf of Joe Biden during the counting of votes on election night in 2020.
Among those spreading the lies was the Gateway Pundit, which repeatedly bragged that it was the first to identify the two women as the culprits in the alleged fraud. Georgia election officials immediately debunked the allegations, but the Gateway Pundit continued to make them for years in dozens of articles.
The preliminary settlement appears to mean the Gateway Pundit will face little or no public reckoning in court for its repeated falsehoods.
The case, first filed in St. Louis Circuit Court in December, 2021, had appeared to be emerging as a high-profile test of the limits of the First Amendment, not unlike the defamation cases filed by parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook against Alex Jones and Dominion Voting Systems’ suit against Fox News.
Both of those cases ended up in huge judgments against the defendants.
A jury in Washington, D.C., awarded the two women more than $148 million in a defamation suit they had filed against former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani for telling the same lies about them that they accused the Gateway Pundit of spreading.
Some legal observers saw the prospect for a similar judgment by a St. Louis jury against the defendants in the suit here – TGP Communications, which does business as Gateway Pundit; Jim Hoft, the company’s sole owner; and his identical twin brother Joe, who is a contributor to the site.
The trial in St. Louis had been scheduled to start next March 10.
But it appears that the two women have yet to collect a dime from Giuliani, so the prospect of a settlement in the St. Louis case may have appeared to be worth taking. And the apparent settlement in the St. Louis case has a precedent – in April 2022 the two women settled their similar claims with One America News Network. The terms of that agreement were not disclosed. OANN did, however, later broadcast a statement that an investigation by Georgia officials had shown that the women “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night.”
What may have driven the Hofts to settle, one attorney familiar with these kinds of cases said, was the failure last July of their filing for bankruptcy in Florida. Had they been allowed bankruptcy protection, the St. Louis defamation case would have been stayed indefinitely.
But instead the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of Florida in West Palm Beach dismissed the case as a bad faith filing, “reflect(ing) the use of bankruptcy as a pure litigation tactic.”
During the bankruptcy proceedings, it was revealed that Gateway Pundit had a media insurance policy that carried $2 million in gross benefits, of which $700,000 had already been spent on legal fees in defending the St. Louis case. The attorney who is familiar with similar cases said it was possible the Hofts wanted to use the remaining insurance money to settle or help settle the case and put it behind them, rather than deplete it further by continuing to fight.
The settlement may mean escape for the Hofts from the potentially knockout punch that many observers thought a St. Louis jury might deal their website, one of the most influential on the far right. It also appears to mean that whatever information had been turned up by the two women’s lawyers in pre-trial discovery will never become public.
It was known, for example, that the lawyers were seeking the company’s financial records and searching for an understanding of how precisely the Gateway Pundit turned clicks on the site’s website into cash, and therefore the extent of their financial motive for repeating their lies.
It was also known that the lawyers were scheduled to depose the Hoft brothers — or perhaps even had by the time of the agreement to settle. Now whatever the Hofts may have said in those depositions, if they occurred, will remain under protective order.
This story was originally published by the Gateway Journalism Review.
