Alliance for a Better Utah, Elevate Strategies, and their founders sued Kevin O'Leary and Fox News Network for defamation Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah. The complaint runs 70 pages, demands a jury, and seeks presumed, actual, and punitive damages.
Former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin leads the plaintiffs' legal team. Utah counsel includes David Irvine, who is also handling the Alliance's state constitutional challenge to the approval of O'Leary's Stratos data center. Joshua Kanter, the Alliance's founder, and Gabrielle Finlayson, a founder of Elevate, are individual plaintiffs, along with their organizations.
A complaint gives one side of a case. This one gives it in unusual detail, with exhibits for each of the ten media appearances at issue and a section on Fox's editorial practices drawn from the discovery record in the Dominion litigation.
O'Leary announced the Stratos Project in late April: a 40,000-acre data center campus in Box Elder County's Hansel Valley, about the land area of Washington, D.C., requiring nine gigawatts of power at full buildout. The Box Elder County Commission approved the project area on May 4 after receiving nearly 4,000 public comments.
On May 11, O'Leary appeared on Fox Business's Mornings with Maria and told host Maria Bartiromo that data scientists he hired had traced online opposition to the project to "two cells inside of Utah" operating on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. He identified the cells as Alliance for a Better Utah and Elevate Strategies, and named Kanter and Finlayson on air.
Over the next three weeks, he repeated the accusation on Tucker Carlson's show, Chris Cuomo's radio program, NBC, CNN, and four more Fox programs. On The Big Money Show, he said he had given federal law enforcement 90 pages of IP addresses. On The Bottom Line, he said IRS filings showed the groups' funding came from "bad places." In several appearances, he held a chart up to the camera, describing it as documentary proof, and insisted he was stating an established fact rather than a suggestion or an inference.
The chart came from a report O'Leary's team published online, an analysis of the Alliance's publicly available IRS Form 990 filings. According to the complaint, neither the chart nor the report mentions China, the Chinese Communist Party, or any foreign entity, and none of the Alliance's 990s do either.
The plaintiffs' engagement with the project before May 11 consisted of a handful of social media posts calling for transparency, a May 7 Elevate newsletter criticizing the approval process, and an Alliance petition seeking an ethics investigation into Senate President Stuart Adams over $135,000 in PAC contributions from companies with business before the MIDA board.
Kanter, who no longer has a public-facing role at the Alliance, had never commented publicly on the data center before O'Leary named him, according to the suit, which says he has made no public statements about the project since.
Both organizations denied the accusations the day they aired. The Alliance later issued a press release titled "The Only Foreign Interest In This Data Center Is Kevin From Canada." Elevate responded with a Substack post and a video describing its funding as Utahns, small-dollar donors, and paid subscribers, with "no shadowy foreign government" behind it.
On May 21, Paul Palandjian, CEO of O'Leary Digital and a partner in the project, told KSL that the company was not asserting any local organizer was acting for a foreign government, though he continued to question the funding of groups opposing the project. O'Leary made four more appearances after that, the last on CNN on June 3.
The plaintiffs sent a legal demand on June 5. On June 25, O'Leary posted a statement conceding he has "no evidence" that any of the named parties are funded by China. The statement did not include an apology. Fox went further. Over the following weekend, hosts on four programs read coordinated corrections, each ending with an apology from the network. Oliver Darcy observed at Status that Fox never apologized on air to Dominion Voting Systems, even after paying $787.5 million to settle that case in 2023.
The lawsuit calls the corrections untimely and insufficient. It notes that clips from at least three of O'Leary's Fox appearances remained accessible on Fox-controlled platforms as of July 14, with no indication that the statements had been retracted, while NBC removed its interview entirely.
Holding a network liable for a guest's statements requires showing the network was at fault, not just the guest. The plaintiffs' theory rests on statements by Fox's own personnel before and during the relevant weeks. Fox shows spent much of 2025 covering data center opposition as a legitimate local concern; host Dagen McDowell called the facilities "monstrosities" in a May 2025 segment and returned to the theme repeatedly.
On May 27, days after O'Leary's fifth Fox appearance, Fox Business correspondent Darren Botelho reported on two Fox programs that O'Leary's claims had not been independently verified. The suit also cites the Dominion summary judgment record on Fox's editorial structure, including its internal fact-checking operation and Bartiromo's handling of Sidney Powell in November 2020, to argue that hosts and executives exercise real control over what airs.
Because the statements accused the plaintiffs of federal crimes, including violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the suit pleads defamation per se, under which harm is presumed.
The defendants dispute all of it. Fox News Media told POLITICO it publicly corrected the record on every program where the comments aired and will contest the suit vigorously. Jeffrey Neiman, O'Leary's attorney, told ABC4 that O'Leary clarified his remarks weeks ago, invited the groups to meet with him directly, and may bring counterclaims. The corrections will matter at trial if the case gets there; retractions can reduce recoverable damages, and Fox will argue its response distinguishes this case from Dominion, where the network never conceded error until settlement.
Whatever a court decides, the accusations moved through Utah politics while they were live. According to the complaint, Sen. Mike Lee shared O'Leary's claims with his followers, and Utah House Majority Whip Candice Pierucci and Rep. Kristen Chevrier reposted a graphic pairing O'Leary's image with Finlayson's. State Sen. Todd Weiler posted on June 6 that Utahns should ask why the Alliance was taking Chinese money, then apologized after O'Leary's retraction, saying he had been duped.
In statements accompanying the filing, Kanter and Finlayson described lost clients, harassment, and continuing fear of a federal investigation, since O'Leary says he filed his accusations with law enforcement and has not withdrawn them there.
The project at the center of the fight has been shrinking. After Adams demanded a 75 percent reduction, O'Leary agreed to halve the footprint to 20,000 acres. Gov. Spencer Cox signed Executive Order 2026-03 on May 29, directing state agencies to prioritize water, air quality, and ratepayer protections in large data center projects.
The Alliance's state suit challenging MIDA's constitutionality is pending in the Third District Court. Nationally, a Gallup survey released in May found 71 percent of Americans oppose construction of an AI data center in their area, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul approved the country's first state-level data center pause on Tuesday.
The case is Alliance for a Better Utah, Inc. et al. v. O'Leary et al., No. 2:26-cv-00664. Once served, the defendants have 21 days to answer or move to dismiss. No hearings are scheduled.
