No “reasonable viewer” would have taken Kevin O’Leary’s claims that China funded opponents of a controversial Box Elder County data center proposal as fact, the celebrity investor’s attorneys argue.

O’Leary and Fox News are asking a federal judge to dismiss a defamation lawsuit brought against them by the Utah-based Alliance for a Better Utah, its founder Joshua Kanter, political consulting firm Elevate Strategies and its founder Gabrielle Finlayson.

The plaintiffs sued in July, alleging that O’Leary’s repeated claims that China or Chinese interests were behind opposition to his proposed data center campus near the north arm of the Great Salt Lake caused “devastating reputational harm, significant economic losses, severe emotional distress, and ongoing threats to their physical safety.”

O’Leary repeated the accusations in numerous media appearances. After he received their demand to retract them, he said he had no evidence to back up the accusations, according to the lawsuit.

Anchors on two Fox News channels also apologized.

But O’Leary’s attorneys say his admission and those apologies don’t show that he knew his claims were false when he made them.

O’Leary identified and published sources, noted he was in discussion with regulators and demanded an audit of Alliance for a Better Utah and Elevate Strategies’ finances.

That suggests “that he subjectively believed his statements were true,” their motion to dismiss reads.

They point to what they describe as an investigation into the groups opposing Stratos. O’Leary said he hired data scientists and forensic digital auditors and examined the Alliance’s public IRS filings. He also published an investigative report and repeatedly challenged the groups to respond to his allegations.

“Open your books, let’s talk about it,” he said during one appearance described by the motion to dismiss.

He has since deleted several social media posts that referred to the forensic audits and that were otherwise related to the claims.

State Sen. Todd Weiler, a Woods Cross Republican, shared O’Leary’s claim that China funded opponents of the data center but later apologized, saying he had been “duped.”

O’Leary’s attorneys also say the plaintiffs were already deeply involved in the fight over Stratos before he began criticizing them.

The Alliance had publicly opposed the project, Elevate had published criticism of it and Finlayson had appeared in a video discussing the project and O’Leary’s role in it, the court filing said.

That makes them “limited-purpose public figures” in the controversy, the lawyers argue. If a judge accepts that argument, the plaintiffs would have to prove actual malice — that O’Leary knew the specified statements were false when he made them or that he acted with reckless disregard for whether they were true — instead of standard negligence.

The motion also argues the lawsuit is too broad, saying it took “ten media appearances spanning weeks and cut them into isolated phrases, stripped of the questions that prompted them.”

Fox makes a similar argument in its own motion to dismiss, but adds that O’Leary’s state of mind cannot simply be attributed to the network.

“Inviting a central player in an ongoing controversy for interviews, while also hosting other speakers with different viewpoints, is good journalism, not actual malice,” the network’s attorneys argue.

Both defendants argue the statements also need to be considered in the context of a heated public fight over the Stratos project.

O’Leary described some of his claims as “my argument” and used phrases such as “proxies” and “bad dudes,” his attorneys say, language they contend was political rhetoric rather than statements of established fact.

The plaintiffs will have the opportunity to file their counterarguments before the judge considers the motions to dismiss.