Newsom ready to pursue lawsuit against Fox News host despite on-air apology

Source: The Guardian

Fri 18 Jul 2025 14.37 EDT
Last modified on Fri 18 Jul 2025 14.38 EDT


The California governor, Gavin Newsom, and Fox News host Jesse Watters have locked into a political tit-for-tat after the network figure admitted to mistakenly claiming that Newsom lied about a phone call with Donald Trump during June’s anti-immigration enforcement protests in the state.

On Thursday, Watters issued an apology on his program stemming from a $787m defamation lawsuit filed by Newsom against the host and Fox News, as the Los Angeles Times and other outlets reported. Newsom’s lawsuit claimed that Watters lied on air about the timeline of the governor’s conversations with the president during the peak of the anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) protests across Los Angeles. Newsom contended that Watters intentionally manipulated his reporting to make it seem as though the governor had lied about a phone call he had with Trump.

On 10 June, Trump publicly said that he had spoken to Newsom “a day ago”, adding that he had called the governor to tell him “you’ve got to do a better job, you’re doing a bad job”. Trump’s comments implied that the two leaders had spoken to each other on the same day that the president ordered several hundred US marines to be deployed to Los Angeles – a decision that was met with widespread opposition from California leaders.

After Trump’s comments, Newsom pushed back on social media against the president’s narrative. Newsom had publicly said that he spoke to Trump after midnight on 7 June, during which there was no discussion of deploying any marines.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/18/gavin-newsom-jesse-watters-lawsuit-fox-news