Days after Fox Corp. settled a huge defamation case against it in the U.S., CEO Lachlan Murdoch dropped a defamation lawsuit he filed in Australia, after the defendant tried to use depositions and other materials from the U.S. case as part if its defense.
Murdoch’s attorney, John Churchill, filed notice on Friday with the Australian federal court that he is discontinuing his efforts in a case against Private Media Pty Ltd., owner of the online news outlet Crikey, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
The suit was filed in August, two months after Crikey ran an opinion column that put part of the blame for the January 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on the Murdoch family. The piece, written by politics editor Bernard Keane, ran June 29 with the headline, “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unidentified co-conspirator.” The piece did not name any individuals in the family by name, but referred to “the Murdochs and their slew of poisonous Fox News commentators.”
Churchill argued when the suit was filed that Crikey’s story promoted “scandalous allegations of criminal conduct and conspiracy” and assertions that were “false and calculated to harm Mr. Murdoch.”
The suit was filed shortly after new defamation standards were enacted in Australia that require plaintiffs to prove a publication caused “serious harm” to their reputation. Defendants like Crikey must prove that their work was in the “public interest.” It was due to go to court in October, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In its defense, Crikey tried to introduce thousands of pages of documents from the Dominion Voting Systems case in the U.S. into the record in Australia, Churchill told the Morning Herald.
Fox settled with Dominion Voting Systems on Tuesday, agreeing to pay $787.5 million. The largest known defamation payout in U.S. history, the settlement was dramatically announced in court after a jury had been seated and moments before the attorneys for both sides were to begin their opening arguments.
In the lead-up to the trial, Dominion Voting Systems released reams of behind-the-scenes texts, emails and other materials that revealed that Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others privately rejected former president Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud but continued to support them on air for fear of losing their audience to rivals like Newsmax and OAN that were broadcasting the claims.
Among the potentially most damaging material was the deposition by Murdoch’s father, Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who acknowledged that the network was endorsing what they knew was a false narrative. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” Murdoch said, according to a filing in the case.
“Mr. Murdoch remains confident that the court would ultimately find in his favor,” Churchill said in a statement. “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.”
Crikey, in a statement on its site, called the decision a “victory for legitimate public interest journalism” and said it stood by the original article and its assertions 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 lie.”
“We are proud of our stand,” the statement said. “We are proud to have exposed the hypocrisy and abuse of power of a media billionaire. This is a victory for free speech. We won.”
University of Sydney Professor David Rolph, an expert in defamation law, told the Morning Herald the case was shaping up to be the first major test case of the new public interest defense in Australian defamation law. “Now we’ll have to await another suitable vehicle.”
Murdoch may have to pay Crikey’s legal fees, though the outlet had set up a GoFundMe campaign that raised $588,735 Australian, and the nation’s laws would prohibit the outlet from recovering the money twice.
