Rupert Murdoch's son, Lachlan Murdoch, has dropped his defamation lawsuit against Australian news website Crikey. The lawsuit claimed that the website defamed him in June 2022 when an article referred to the Murdoch family as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the January 6, 2021 riots at the US Capitol. Mr. Murdoch's lawyer, John Churchill, said he had filed a notice of discontinuance with the Federal Court of Australia and that Mr. Murdoch remains confident that the court would ultimately find in his favor.
This decision comes just days after News Corp settled a separate lawsuit with voting firm Dominion for AUD$1.6 billion. On Thursday, Lachlan Murdoch dropped his libel suit against Australian news site Crikey citing thousands of pages of evidence made public in the recent lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems—an election technology company—against Fox in the United States.
Murdoch is confident that the court will ultimately find in his favor but does not want to enable Crikey to use this case as an opportunity to litigate issues from another jurisdiction. Previously, a judge had ruled that events from January 6 were not relevant and determined that Dominion did not plan to argue Fox caused or contributed directly to those events during their insurrection.
At this time, Crikeys has not responded to requests for comment on these developments within their ongoing legal dispute with Lachlan Murdoch and News Corp entities more broadly.
Lachlan's decision highlights both confidence within his position while acknowledging complexities across multiple international jurisdictions involved in cases related or potentially influenced by one another—in this instance between Australia and America specifically—as they relate back towards matters concerning media coverage amidst contemporary political climates globally speaking overall today now too increasingly interconnected hereafter going forward beyond simply any singular nation-state alone itself evermore necessarily therefore indeed even still yet always ever thus so as well.