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SYDNEY — Fox Corporation chief executive Lachlan Murdoch dropped a defamation case against an independent Australian publisher Friday, just days after Fox News ended its own defamation ordeal in the United States with a $787.5 million settlement.
The decision avoids what promised to be a public rehashing Down Under of the damaging claims made by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News in the United States, as the Australian news website Crikey and its parent company prepared to use documents from the American case in their defense.
Lachlan Murdoch, the son of Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, was confident he would have prevailed, said his attorney John Churchill.
But the younger Murdoch did 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,” he said in a statement.
Crikey, an edgy online news magazine, celebrated the outcome in its typically blunt style.
“The fact is, Murdoch sued us, and then dropped his case,” Crikey’s parent company, Private Media, said in a statement posted to Twitter. “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 defense to the court. The imputations drawn by Murdoch from that article were ridiculous.”
Fox was resigned to a tough trial. Then, a secret mediator stepped in.
The controversy began in June last year when Crikey published an opinion piece headlined “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator.”
In it, Crikey political editor Bernard Keane argued that the Murdochs and Fox News commentators shared some blame for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol in Washington. The headline did not specify which Murdoch was the “unindicted co-conspirator.”
Crikey took down the piece the next day following a legal threat from Lachlan Murdoch. The website also offered to publish a clarifying statement, but it refused to apologize. When Murdoch continued to demand an apology, Crikey doubled down by reposting the opinion piece, printing the Fox Corp. CEO’s legal threats and effectively asking to be sued.
“We want to defend those accusations in court,” Private Media said in an open letter published online and in newspapers in Australia and the United States.
Murdoch sued, claiming that Crikey was conducting “a campaign of self-promotion” to boost subscribers.
Crikey’s subscriber numbers did, in fact, boom as people around the world signed up to support a website many had never heard of but one that was now waging what seemed like a David vs. Goliath media battle. A GoFundMe site for Crikey’s legal defense has raised almost $400,000 — or close to 600,000 Australian dollars.
“Media outlets in Australia get sued all the time, but it’s relatively unusual for a media outlet like Crikey to take the sort of stand it did,” said David Rolph, a law professor at the University of Sydney and an expert on defamation. “Crikey did something distinct here in making very public the position it took and why it was taking that and inviting public support.”
What to know about the lawsuit Dominion filed against Fox News
Crikey was also making a novel defense. Australia’s defamation laws are much stricter than those in the United States, Rolph said. But this case promised to test a new law empowering media to argue that what they publish is in the public interest.
“The case would have given some clarity about how this defense would have worked,” Rolph said. “We’ll never know what was going to happen, but now Lachlan Murdoch will never have to get into the witness box to give evidence.”
The defamation suit in Australia also offered an ironic contrast to Fox News’s own legal battle against Dominion in the United States, in which the company defended its journalists’ free speech rights. At the same time, Murdoch appeared to be attacking those same rights on the other side of the planet.
The federal court trial had been set to start in Sydney in October and run for three weeks.
But the case took a turn earlier this month when Private Media moved to make a “contextual truth defense” on top of its public interest and qualified privilege arguments. The contextual truth defense, which a judge had not ruled on yet, would have allowed Crikey to cite thousands of pages of evidence from the Dominion lawsuit, and threatened to turn the Australian trial into a lengthy and messy rehashing of the American case.
“In their latest attempt to change their defense strategy, Crikey has tried to introduce thousands of pages of documents from a defamation case in another jurisdiction, which has now settled,” Churchill said in his statement.
“In that case, in the U.S. state of Delaware, the trial judge ruled the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in the U.S. Capitol, were not relevant. Further, the plaintiff Dominion Voting Systems made clear it would not argue that Fox News caused the events of Jan. 6, and at no point did it ever argue that Mr. Murdoch was personally responsible for the events of January 6. Yet this is what Crikey’s article alleged and what Crikey is attempting to argue in Australia.”
Fox News’s decision to settle the Dominion lawsuit this week nonetheless appears to have doomed its Australian defamation case.
“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,” Private Media said. “How do we know? Because Dominion sued Fox News for promoting the lies and Fox just paid $1.17 billion [Australian dollars] to Dominion to settle the case.”
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