Lachlan Murdoch drops defamation suit against Australian outlet after Fox News’ Dominion settlement

‘Murdoch sued us, and then dropped his case. We are proud of our stand. We won’

Rupert Murdoch, centre, with sons, Lachlan, left, and James, right, pictured in 2014 (AP)

Lachlan Murdoch has dropped a defamation lawsuit against Australian news outlet Crikey which called him an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the Jan 6 US Capitol insurrection.

Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son, who is chief executive of Fox Corp, dropped his action days after the company settled a US case with a $787.5m payout said to be the largest of its kind in history. Fox News settled a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems that highlighted several instances of conspiracy theories that the conservative news network had aired during and after the 2020 US presidential election.

Lachlan Murdoch’s lawyer, John Churchill, said in a statement that a notice of discontinuance had been filed in federal court in Australia. He said he believed the court would have ruled in Mr Murdoch’s favour, but referred to “a case from another jurisdiction” as the reason for dropping the lawsuit.

“Mr 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,” he said.

Last August, Mr Murdoch’s lawyers said Crikey published an article that implied he “illegally conspired with Donald Trump to incite an armed mob to march on the Capitol to physically prevent confirmation of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election”.

Lawyers claimed the June 2022 article described Mr Murdoch as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the effort by Trump supporters to overturn his 2020 election loss to president Joe Biden.

Will Hayward, the chief executive of Private Media, Crikey’s publisher, said it was a victory for legitimate public interest journalism.

“The fact is, Murdoch sued us, and then dropped his case. We are proud of our stand. This is a victory for free speech. We won,” he said. “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 was attempting to use testimony by Mr Murdoch and his father Rupert in the Dominion Voting Systems’ US lawsuit as part of its defence to the Australian case, according to local media reports.

“This was shaping up to be the first major test case of the new public interest defence in Australian defamation law,” David Rolph, a University of Sydney professor, told the Sydney Morning Herald. “Now we’ll have to await another suitable vehicle.”

Mr Rolph said “defamation litigation doesn’t exist in a vacuum” and that “the revelations in the US proceedings provided the backdrop which made it difficult to litigate the Australian proceedings”.

Other experts also said that after settling the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit in the US, it made sense for Mr Murdoch to “want to see this case go away, too”.

Dr Michael Douglas, a senior lecturer at the University of Western Australia Law School, told the newspaper that if the Australian case had continued, some of the evidence before the US court may have been aired again “in all its gory detail, potentially including thorough cross-examination of Lachlan Murdoch himself”.

Fox News declared last week that it was “pleased” to have paid out the vast sum to Dominion Voting Systems.

The network avoided a gruelling six-week courtroom examination of its journalistic practices.

“We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” Fox said in its statement.