Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch drops January 6 defamation case

Fox Corporation chief executive Lachlan Murdoch on Friday dropped a high-profile defamation case against an Australian website that accused his family's conservative media empire of fueling the 2021 US Capitol riots.

Lawyers for the Crikey website said that Murdoch, the eldest son of billionaire Rupert Murdoch, had abruptly "discontinued his defamation case" eight months into legal proceedings.

Lachlan Murdoch sued Crikey for a series of articles that labelled Murdoch's family and "poisonous" Fox News commentators as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the January 6 post-US-election riots.

The articles referenced Fox News's decision to amplify unfounded conspiracy theories that the presidential election, won by Joe Biden, was stolen from the then-incumbent Donald Trump.

Murdoch, with the support of a high-powered legal team, had widely been expected to win the case and saddle the small independent publisher with ruinous legal costs.

His abrupt decision to drop the lawsuit came just days after Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to US firm Dominion for falsely claiming their election voting machines were rigged.

Crikey had sought to introduce evidence relating to the Dominion case to help its defence, a potentially problematic development for Murdoch.

The US case was both costly and deeply embarrassing for Fox, exposing internal messages that showed the network knew fraud claims by Trump and his surrogates were untrue.

The Dominion case was settled before trial, and before any of the Murdoch family or Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson were forced to testify in open court.

Fox News still faces a separate $2.7 billion lawsuit from another electronic voting company -- Smartmatic -- which claims that the right-wing network broadcast lies that "decimated" its business prospects.

'Marketing campaign'

Murdoch's Australian lawyers on Friday insisted there was "no truth" to Crikey's allegations, but said 92-year-old Rupert's heir apparent had decided to drop the case anyway.

"(Lachlan) Murdoch remains confident that the court would ultimately find in his favour," lawyer John Churchill said.

"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."

Crikey, an often pugilistic left-leaning news site, had repeatedly dared Murdoch to sue them over the articles, and launched fundraising and subscription drives off the back of the legal action.

Crikey, and its parent company Private Media, appeared to have been blindsided by the case's abrupt end.

"We won. Thank you to all of @crikey_news team, our wider staff, our legal team at @marquelawyers, all our subs and everyone who contributed to the campaign," Private Media CEO Will Hayward tweeted.

His lawyers said Crikey would seek to recoup legal costs.

The Murdoch family remains a major media player in Rupert's native Australia, despite his decades-old focus on global expansion into the United States and Britain.

© 2023 AFP