Lachlan Murdoch Drops Defamation Claim Against Australian News Site Following Dominion Settlement
Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch is dropping his defamation claim against Australian news site Crikey over a column that connected him to the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
In a statement, Murdoch’s attorney, John Churchill, cited the recent settlement of Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox Corp. and Fox News in dropping the litigation. In the proceedings, which might not have started until next year, Crikey was poised to introduce material gathered during the discovery process in the Dominion suit, in which Fox agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle the claim and avoid a trial.
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“It’s a matter of public record that Crikey admits that there is no truth to the imputations that were made about Mr. Murdoch in the article,” Churchill said. “In their latest attempt to change their defense strategy, Crikey has tried to introduce thousands of pages of documents from a defamation case from another jurisdiction, which has now settled.”
The defamation claim was over a June 29, 2022, analysis piece that identified the Murdochs as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the January 6th attacks on the Capitol. The case was filed against Private Media, parent company of Crikey.
The judge in the Dominion lawsuit, Eric Davis, told attorneys last week that he would not allow the January 6th attacks to be introduced in a trial, finding it unfairly prejudicial to Fox’s side.
Churchill said in his statement that Dominion also did not argue that Murdoch bore responsibility for January 6th. Churchill said that Murdoch “remains confident that the court would ultimately find in his favour, however he does not wish to further enable Crikey’s use of the court to litigate a case from another jurisdiction that has already been settled and facilitate a marketing campaign designed to attract subscribers and boost their profits.”
Private Media CEO Will Hayward and chairman Eric Beecher said in a statement, “This is a substantial victory for public interest journalism. We stand by what we published last June, and everything we laid out in our defense to the court. The imputations drawn by Murdoch from that article were ridiculous.”
“We stand by our position that Lachlan Murdoch was culpable in promoting the lie of the 2020 election result because he, and his father, had the power to stop the lies. How do we know? Because Dominion sued Fox News for promoting the lies and Fox just paid $1.17 billion [in AUS dollars] to Dominion to settle the case.”
They called the news “a victory for free speech. We won.”
The site has not taken down the column and tweeted it out again on Friday.
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