President Donald Trump's defamation lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal has gotten personal.
The president claims he personally told the media mogul claims he'd penned a bawdy birthday message for Jeffrey Epstein two decades prior were fake, but the Journal went ahead and published a report describing the missive despite Trump's denial. His lawyers on Monday asked a judge to force Murdoch to answer questions under oath right away because he's so old.
"Murdoch is 94 years old, has suffered from multiple health issues throughout his life, is believed to have suffered recent significant health scares, and is presumed to live in New York, New York," Trump's filing states. "Taken together, these factors weigh heavily in determining that Murdoch would be unavailable for in-person testimony at trial."
The filing repeatedly mentions Murdoch's age and health issues, and legal observers said it was clearly meant to needle the media mogul.
"The way it's being framed is almost sarcastic," said Joseph Azam, a former top executive for Murdoch's newspaper and publishing empire. "It's classic Trump. He is using lawfare, to use his own term, to silence people."
The unusually urgent demand for a deposition within 15 days – to which the judge gave Murdoch until Monday to respond – seems like "a gratuitous attempt to poke the bear," according to Azam.
"The problem is he's going after people who are equally equipped — and in some ways, I would say, better equipped — to navigate this stuff," the former Murdoch executive said.
Trump and Murdoch have known each other for decades from New York City circles, and they have forged an alliance since the former real estate tycoon entered politics as a Republican, with Murdoch-owned Fox News promoting his candidacies and agenda for the past decade.
Murdoch and his sons agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News for parroting Trump's lies about his 2020 election loss, but evidence from that trial make clear the mogul doesn't hold the president in high esteem, and Trump has complained that his media holdings haven't been positive enough in covering him lately.
Trump's lawsuit blames Murdoch personally for the Epstein card report because he did not agree to favor his old friend, who once fed his tabloids bits of gossip about himself and others in Manhattan high society.
"So long as Rupert is alive — and may he be alive as long as he wants — not a whole lot is going to change when it comes to the core of this type of stuff," Azam said. "People are still gonna assume that they can call him and he has some magic wand under his desk that can actually make things move."