O’Leary says he didn’t defame opponents of his plan for a large Utah data center

Celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary and Fox News Network are asking a judge to throw out a defamation lawsuit from two Utahns O’Leary had labeled Chinese agents while defending his Stratos data center proposal earlier this year. 

Attorneys for the businessman of “Shark Tank” fame filed a motion to dismiss the case Monday in U.S. District Court in Utah, writing, “while O’Leary’s statements may have been critical of Plaintiffs, they do not rise to the level of defamation.”

Fox News Media agreed in its own filing Monday, joining O’Leary in asking for the case to be dismissed with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled at a later time. 

Utahns sue O’Leary, Fox News over ‘smear campaign’

In July, Joshua Kanter, founder of the left-leaning Alliance for a Better Utah, and Gabrielle Finlayson, of the Democratic and progressive political firm Elevate Strategies, sued O’Leary and Fox for a “weekslong smear campaign” against them. The Utahns are seeking damages to be determined at trial. 

It came in a season of intense public outcry against the proposed data center that had already spilled over into the courts. A Box Elder County citizens’ group filed its own lawsuit to pursue a referendum allowing voters to decide the fate of the project in the remote Hansel Valley, near the northern tip of the Great Salt Lake. 

In June, O’Leary acknowledged in a social media post he had “no evidence” Kanter, Finlayson or their organizations were funded by China. 

Kanter and Finlayson allege they suffered damage to their reputations despite the change in O’Leary’s message after he accused them of being “two cells inside of Utah” seeking to undermine American development of artificial intelligence on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. 

Utah lawmakers get a primer on data centers after a summer of protests and political fallout 

They contend O’Leary had sought to discredit local opposition to the data center project in Box Elder County, approved first by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority and then by the county’s three-member commission.  

The authority has said the project is paused as the still-pending referendum court case plays out. O’Leary has moved to dismiss that case, too, and so has the county. He has said the 20,000-acre data center project — down from 40,000 acres — is still moving forward. 

In this week’s court filings, attorneys for O’Leary argue the Utahns republished the alleged defamatory statements on their own social media platforms and used them as a fundraising tool. 

They contend in the motion that O’Leary, at the time of his comments, had “reasoned his way to the China connection from observed facts rather than publishing a statement he knew to be false.”   

For its part, Fox News Network said the plaintiffs didn’t get in touch with Fox or O’Leary to challenge the assertions or ask for a correction until weeks after O’Leary’s most recent appearance on the matter. 

“Once they finally did so, O’Leary posted a statement explaining that he had no evidence that the plaintiffs are funded by China or the Chinese Communist Party,” the motion states. “Fox then aired corrections on each of its programs at issue.”