Fox News Wanted to Play Simpsons ‘Treehouse of Horror’ Episodes in Court to Justify Spreading Misinformation

It’s not uncommon for The Simpsons’ annual “Treehouse of Horror” episodes to get political. Usually, this is due to the show’s frequent proximity to U.S. presidential elections, hence why we once got an episode in which Bob Dole and Bill Clinton get stripped naked and shot into the cold vacuum of space.

While you might not expect these episodes to be taken seriously in a court of law, several “Treehouse of Horror” episodes were nearly part of a billion dollar defamation trial involving allegations of electoral fraud.

As you may recall, in 2021, Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for $1.6 billion, alleging that the cable news network “purposely aired false claims about the company’s role in the 2020 presidential election in order to boost ratings.” Fox eventually settled the case for $737 million, perhaps because their “key source” for the election fraud claims was a woman who claims to be a ghost that can talk to the wind. 

But before the settlement was reached, Fox had a solid plan for how to make their case in court: playing old episodes of The Simpsons.

In 2023, NBC reported that Fox’s “lengthy list of trial exhibits” included four clips from the long-running cartoon, including the opening to Season 20’s “Treehouse of Horror XIX,” in which Homer attempts to vote for Barack Obama, but the electronic machine keeps changing his selection to “John McCain” before eventually killing him.

They also planned to show the beginning of “Treehouse of Horror XXXI” from 2020, which illustrates how a dystopian hellscape forms after Homer neglects to vote. 

They also selected two non-Halloween electoral themed online shorts — in “Homer Votes 2012,” Homer casts his electronic ballot for Mitt Romney (since he “did invent Obamacare”) only to, again, be dragged into an evil voting machine.

In “Homer Votes 2016,” he attempts to support Hillary Clinton (and “not the guy who really likes his daughter”), but runs into Vladimir Putin at the polling site. It wasn’t exactly the franchise’s finest hour. 

What point was Fox News trying to make with these assorted clips? It’s unclear. Were they trying to illustrate that voting machines sometimes murder people? Or were they going to argue that they should only be held up to the same journalistic standards as a literal cartoon?

Perhaps this irrelevant evidence was part of some cunning strategy. Like when The Simpsons’ blue-haired lawyer character asked a jury to debate the attractiveness of Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson (it was the ‘90s) because he was so confident in the defendant’s guilt, he could “waste the court’s time by rating the super hunks.”

We’ll never know what the plan was because a settlement was ultimately reached — possibly because Dominion’s lawyers caught most of an episode of Matlock in a bar with the sound off.

You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter (if it still exists by the time you’re reading this).