Lachlan Murdoch has paid $840,000 in legal costs to a small Australian publisher after he dropped a defamation lawsuit accusing the company of linking his family to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, his attorney said Tuesday.
Mr. Murdoch, the Fox chief executive, said the sum covered all costs incurred by Private Media, publisher of the news site Kreiki, in connection with the defamation case, Mr. Murdoch’s lawyer, John Churchill, said in a statement. filed against the company. The amount is equivalent to about 1.3 million Australian dollars.
Mr. Murdoch dropped the lawsuit in April, two days after Fox News settled a separate defamation lawsuit brought in the US by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company, for $787.5 million.
Mr. Churchill said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr. Murdoch remained confident the court would have ruled in his favour, but stopped the case because he did not want to “facilitate a marketing campaign aimed at attracting subscribers and increasing their profits.”
Mr. Murdoch sued Crikey last August over a opinion column With the headline: “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. Murdoch is his unconvicted accomplice.” The column did not specify whether it referred to Mr. Murdoch or his father, Rupert Murdoch. The article argued that Murdoch and Fox News commentators were responsible for the 2021 Capitol insurrection by pushing false allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
The defamation lawsuit became intertwined with the Dominion case after Crikey added thousands of pages of evidence discovered by the voting technology company. Dominion accused Fox of defaming it by repeatedly linking it to false allegations of voter fraud on multiple broadcasts.
The money raised by the company through crowdfunding to help pay legal costs — about $378,000, or about A$588,000 — will be donated to the Alliance for Freedom of Journalists, Will Hayward, CEO of Private Media, writes in an article for Crikey. It is an Australian non-profit organisation. This donation was a condition of the agreement with Mr. Murdoch.
“This money has been raised from the goodwill of people across Australia who believe in the importance of freedom of expression,” said Mr Hayward. “This money will now go to support the Coalition and its team as they champion this cause around the world.”