Media mogul Barry Diller says he doesn’t plan to work with law firms that have brokered settlements with President Donald Trump.
Notable settlements with Trump since his return to the White House include Disney, who paid $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought against ABC News and star anchor George Stephanopoulos, and Meta, which paid $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit about being kicked off Facebook and Instagram after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“The worst that could happen to them under what the administration was doing is they could lose a little business,” the IAC chairman told Bloomberg while promoting his new memoir “Who Knew.” “I would never employ one of those law firms that did that, that essentially folded under these circumstances.”
The remark came as Diller expressed sympathy for Paramount Global’s non-executive chairwoman Shari Redstone, who is currently fighting a $20 billion lawsuit from Trump as she is selling control of the media giant to David Ellison’s Skydance Media. The $8 billion deal is currently under regulatory review by the FCC due a required transfer of broadcast licenses.
Paramount is currently in mediation talks with Trump as it looks to settle the lawsuit over an Oct. 7 “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, which Trump claims was deceptively edited to make her look good.
“If a guillotine is at your throat and it costs you $20 million or whatever to settle this lawsuit so that you can get out of going into bankruptcy or close to it, then I’m sympathetic to that,” Diller said.
FCC chairman Brendan Carr has argued that the settlement talks with Trump are unrelated to the agency’s review of the Skydance deal.
But Carr has also launched an ongoing “news distortion” investigation into the Harris interview and has warned that “all options remain on the table,” including potentially revoking CBS’ broadcast license if the network is found to have violated the agency’s public interest standard. He has also previously threatened to block M&A for companies who embrace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and is reportedly seeking concessions in the Paramount-Skydance deal.
In addition to Paramount, Carr has opened DEI investigations into Disney, Comcast/NBCUniversal and Verizon. The latter recently received FCC approval on its $20 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications, which included a commitment to end its DEI practices.
“Politicizing the FCC is a crime,” Diller said. “It’s simply a crime saying that broadcasters or people whose licenses the FCC holds should be subject to political determination.”
The Skydance deal, which was initially expected to close on April 7, recently triggered its first 90-day extension. If the deal is not closed by July 6, the deadline will be automatically pushed another 90 days to Oct. 4. After that, if the deal is still not closed, or if a regulator blocks the merger or one of the parties involved breaches the terms of the agreement, then Skydance and Paramount will have the option of terminating the deal. Exercising that option would leave Paramount on the hook to pay Skydance a $400 million breakup fee.
Prior to reaching a deal with Skydance, Diller’s IAC was among the parties interested in Paramount and went as far as entering into non-disclosure agreements. But he later called it quits, telling CNBC at the time that it was “unwise to get in an auction with someone who has a pretty much unlimited balance sheet.”
Shares of Paramount are up 12.9% year to date and 7.7% in the past six months.
