Just days after Fox Corp. settled the Dominion defamation suit for $787.5 million, the company’s executive chairman and CEO Lachlan Murdoch dropped defamation proceedings against the independent Australian news site Crikey, which linked his family to the U.S. Capitol attack.
In August 2022, Murdoch launched defamation proceedings in a Sydney court against Crikey‘s owners Private Media over an article published in June that named the Murdoch family as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Jan. 6 attack. The filing came a day after Private Media’s chairman Eric Beecher and managing editor Peter Fray put their names on an ad in The New York Times inviting Murdoch to sue them.
Murdoch’s lawyer John Churchill told the BBC that pursuing the case would only benefit Crikey.
“Mr. Murdoch remains confident that the court would ultimately find in his favour,” Churchill said in a statement to the BBC. “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.”
In a statement posted to Twitter, Private Media’s Beecher and CEO Will Hayward said, “This is a substantial victory for legitimate public interest journalism. We stand by what we published last June, and everything we laid out in our defence to the court.”
“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 to Dominion to settle the case,” the statement added.
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