Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday sued Fox News for hundreds of millions of dollars, alleging the channel engaged in “malicious propaganda” by falsely claiming he lied about when he spoke with President Donald Trump during protests in Los Angeles over immigration enforcement.

Newsom is asking the court to make Fox pay $787 million in damages. That’s a nearly identical sum to the amount Fox agreed to pay to Dominion Voting Systems in a 2023 settlement over the channel’s airing of conspiracy theories around Dominion’s voting machines that fueled the fallacy that Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

“Gov. Gavin Newsom has become the latest target of Fox’s continuing efforts to lie and distort on behalf of the President,” the lawsuit filed in Delaware Superior Court said.

“Freedom of speech does not grant the right to knowingly fabricate false statements and intentionally poison our democratic processes.”

The lawsuit opened with reference to the Dominion settlement, and Newsom — widely viewed as a Democratic presidential contender for 2028 — wasted little time in leveraging that case in a fundraising email to supporters.

“If Fox News wants to lie to the American people on Donald Trump’s behalf, they should face consequences — just like they did in the Dominion case,” Newsom said in the email.

Fox said in a statement it would defend the case vigorously, and looked forward to its dismissal. “Gov. Newsom’s transparent publicity stunt is frivolous and designed to chill free speech critical of him,” Fox said.

The lawsuit comes amid a feud and separate legal battle between Newsom and Trump over the Republican president’s commandeering of the California National Guard, and deployment of hundreds of U.S. Marines, during Los Angeles protests against immigration sweeps. Newsom and the state of California sued Trump and his administration June 9 in San Francisco U.S. District Court over Trump’s deployment order. An appeals court has, for now, allowed Trump to retain control over several thousand Guard troops.

Central to Newsom’s lawsuit filed Friday — undertaken by him personally, not as governor, his office said — is a claim by Trump in a June 10 news briefing that he talked with Newsom the day before. Newsom denied speaking to Trump that recently, claiming in a social media post that “There was no call” and that “Americans should be alarmed that a President deploying Marines onto our streets doesn’t even know who he’s talking to.”

The lawsuit alleged that Fox then branded Newsom “a liar” via on-air statements and text shown during an evening show.

Trump, the lawsuit noted, had provided Fox host John Roberts with a screenshot of a call log indicating Newsom and the president had a 16-minute phone call on June 6 or June 7.

Despite Trump having claimed at the news briefing that the Newsom call had happened “a day ago” — June 9 — Roberts in a June 10 broadcast “intentionally altered” the timeline, saying Trump said he called Newsom “yesterday or the other day,” the lawsuit alleged.

“Mr. Roberts chose to present a factually incorrect picture to Fox viewers to obscure President Trump’s false statement of fact,” the lawsuit claimed.

On an evening Fox show, host Jesse Watters and Fox producers “deliberately edited the portion of President Trump’s statement so that viewers would not hear President Trump stating that he had spoken to Governor Newsom ‘a day ago,’ ” the lawsuit alleged.

And Fox ran on-screen text during Watters’ show saying, “Gavin lied about Trump’s call,” according to the lawsuit, which included a screenshot purporting to show text on a Fox News screen.

Fox, whose viewers lean conservative, sought to harm Newsom politically, the lawsuit claimed.

“Fox knew that the dispute between Newsom and Trump implicated issues of the public’s trust in their leaders,” the lawsuit alleged. “Yet instead of truthfully informing the public about the dispute, Fox once again chose to create false propaganda to defend the president while casting Governor Newsom as dishonest.”

A letter sent Friday to Fox from Newsom’s lawyers said that in the call between the governor and president, Trump never raised the topics of the Los Angeles protests or use of the National Guard, and when Newsom sought to discuss the situation in Los Angeles, Trump “steered the topic away.”

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the call.

The letter from Newsom’s lawyers to Fox asserts that the governor is “prepared to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit if Fox News retracts the claim that he lied when speaking about President Trump not calling him on June 9.” The lawyers demanded Fox give as much airtime to retracting the alleged falsehoods as it spent “presenting and amplifying them,” and that Watters and Fox “must issue a formal on-air apology for the lie (they) have spread about Governor Newsom.”