Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch dropped his libel suit against an Australian publisher on Thursday, two days after his company settled a blockbuster libel suit against them.
Mr Murdoch sued Private Media, owner of the news website Crikey, in August over an op-ed published by Crikey in June linking the Murdoch family to the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
The op-ed was headlined, “Trump is a confirmed traitor on the loose. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator.” It said the Murdochs and “venomous” Fox News commentators were to blame for the uprising, though it did not name Mr Murdoch.
The case is expected to go to court in Sydney this year. Mr. Murdoch spends most of his time in Australia, where his family lives.
In a statement on Thursday, Mr Murdoch’s Australian lawyer, John Churchill, said Crikey had recently added the thousands of pages of evidence to his defense case that had been made public in the recent lawsuit brought against election technology company Dominion Voting Systems. , had brought against Vos in the United States.
“Mr. Murdoch remains confident that the court will eventually find in his favor; however, he does not wish to further allow Crikey to use the court to litigate a case from another jurisdiction that has already been settled and to facilitate a marketing campaign designed to attract subscribers and increase their profits,” Mr Churchill said.
Mr Churchill said that in the Dominion case, which was settled on Tuesday for $787.5 million, just as a trial was about to start, the judge had ruled that the events of January 6 were irrelevant and that Dominion had no intention of arguing that Fox had caused the uprising.
“Yet this is what Crikey’s article claimed and what Crikey is trying to argue in Australia,” said Mr Churchill.
Will Hayward, Private Media’s CEO, and Eric Beecher, its chairman, said in a statement that Mr Murdoch’s dropping of the lawsuit was “a substantial victory for legitimate public interest journalism”.
“We stand by our position that Lachlan Murdoch was guilty of promoting the lie of the 2020 election result because he and his father had the power to stop the lies,” they said.
Australia has defamation laws that make it much easier for public figures to successfully sue media organizations than in the United States. In the United States, the First Amendment provides broad protections for the press.
However, that protection afforded Fox limited defense in the Dominion lawsuit against it. Dominion sued Fox for its role in broadcasting and promoting unfounded conspiracy theories linking its voting machines to mass fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Fox’s legal team faced a series of setbacks as they tried to defend the network, including a pre-trial court ruling that all statements made about Dominion were false and that Fox could not argue in front of a jury that the claims of voter fraud had aired on the basis that they were newsworthy.
Fox and Dominion settled the case as lawyers prepared to give their opening statements before a jury. Fox did not apologize, but said in a statement that it acknowledged “the court’s rulings that certain allegations about Dominion are false.”
The settlement amount is one of the highest payouts ever in a libel case.
A spokesman for Mr Murdoch declined to comment further on the resolution of the Australian defamation case.
