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A trove of court documents on Rupert Murdoch’s failed attempt to give Lachlan control of the media empire exposes fears that his siblings would make it less right-wing. By Mike Seccombe.
‘Ghastly Tony Abbott’: Leaks reveal Murdoch family feud
The news in September 2023 that Rupert Murdoch, then aged 92, was stepping down from the chairmanship of his media empire to make way for his favourite child, Lachlan, came as no surprise to Rupert’s adult daughters.
Prudence and Elisabeth were nevertheless blindsided by what happened next. Just one day after taking the reins at Fox and News Corp, Lachlan announced the nomination of the onion-munching, climate change-denying, hard-right-wing former prime minister of Australia Tony Abbott for the Fox board.
Prudence, the only child of Rupert’s first marriage, had seen a report of the Abbott nomination. She texted her half-sister.
“I can’t support Lachlan if he doesn’t change his stance on climate change,” Prue wrote. “He has now appointed the ghastly Tony Abbott to the Fox board…”
Elisabeth, the first of three children from Rupert’s second marriage – the others being Lachlan and James – responded: “Oh my God, what a bad move. Definitely making it clear I am voting against that appointment.”
They were powerless to stop it, under the terms of a trust that held the family’s extensive media assets.
As explained in a 13,000-word piece in The New York Times last week, the complex trust was set up in 1999 when Rupert and his second wife, Anna, divorced after 31 years, and he took up with Wendi Deng, who would become the third of his five wives.
Under Californian law, Anna could have taken half of all Rupert’s assets. Instead she opted for an arrangement whereby control of the empire would be divided between Rupert and his four existing children. He would have four votes in determining how things would be run, and they would have one each. Any subsequent children – and Deng went on to have two – would be entitled to an equal share of Rupert’s fortune but no voting power.
The new trust would expire in 2030, or when Rupert died, leaving his four eldest children with an equal measure of control.
“The idea,” as second son James said, in another, equally lengthy piece that came out in The Atlantic magazine just a day after the Times story, “was that it would incentivize us to cooperate.”
It didn’t. It encouraged fratricidal plotting for control of the business, which only grew more urgent as Rupert grew more frail.
Not that friction between the siblings was anything new. As James told the author of The Atlantic piece, McKay Coppins: “My father was always trying to pull everyone into the company so that he could manipulate them against each other.”
The “unspoken competition for Rupert’s approval”, Coppins wrote, was particularly intense between the two boys. They were the closest in age, born only 15 months apart, but had very different personalities. Lachlan is described as “rugged and charismatic and self-consciously emulative of his father”, while James, “the intense, cerebral kid who bleached his hair and pierced his ears and provoked his father at the dinner table with contrarian questions, was typecast as the rebel”.
The sisters were never serious contenders to run the business, James told Coppins, because of their father’s misogyny. They were increasingly drawn into the conflict, however, through shifting alliances with their father and brothers. Rupert deputised Elisabeth in 2012, for example, to tell James he must take the fall for the British phone-hacking scandal and resign as the head of News Corp’s British newspaper division.
As she told Coppins more than a decade later, sacrificing her relationship with James in pursuit of her father’s approval was “one of the greatest regrets of my life”.
All families have their issues, but few, if any, have had their inner dynamics so widely chronicled and analysed as the Murdochs. There is, as James put it, an entire canon of work devoted to Rupert and his offspring, as one son and then the other has seemed to be ahead in the succession race. For the most part, though, these have been fuelled by second-hand accounts and strategic, anonymous leaks.
What makes the most recent two additions to the canon so riveting is that they present first-person accounts from the family members themselves, attesting to spectacular dysfunction. It was exposed by the family’s internecine battle over the supposedly irrevocable trust arrangement, which Rupert and Lachlan sought to negate.
The old man and his firstborn son did not want power over the empire to be shared among the siblings. They wanted Lachlan to run the whole show. They, their lawyers and adviser came up with a plan to effect this change. They called it, apparently without irony, Project Family Harmony.
Under an amendment to the trust, inserted by Rupert’s lawyers in 2006, it was possible to change the terms of the sub-trusts of each of the children, provided such change was made in good faith and for the sole benefit of the beneficiary.
Their position was that putting Lachlan in sole charge would benefit all the trust beneficiaries because the family business would profit under him, whereas it would not if the other children – particularly the “troublesome beneficiary”, as they referred to James – had any say.
Bitter family recriminations ensued, and eventually proceedings in a court in Reno, Nevada, where the trust was incorporated. The case proceeded in strict secrecy, but after it was over, more than 3000 pages of trial documents, including the briefs, pre-trial depositions and the full transcript of the trial itself, along with private messages between family members, fell into the hands of two reporters for The New York Times, Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg.
Meanwhile, over at The Atlantic, Coppins was working up a piece focused on James. He also ended up getting access to some of the legal documents. His was a more personal story, but the two pieces were complementary.
The most important take out of both is that, fundamentally, the whole fight was about politics.
Rupert’s longstanding support of right-wing causes and politicians is well-documented. His various media outlets have championed Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. In this country, Murdoch media campaigned for the “ghastly” Tony Abbott and against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Everywhere, they gave credence to vaccine opponents and climate-change deniers, among many other interventions. They now are lending support to Peter Dutton.
Perhaps most egregiously, his top-rating Fox network promulgated the fiction that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. The false claims repeatedly aired by Fox commentators that the voting machine maker Dominion had fixed the election wound up costing the company US$787.5 million.
The documents from the court case revealed the full grandiosity of Rupert’s commitment to combating the liberal and the “woke”.
“Fox and our papers are the only faintly conservative voices against the monolithic liberal media,” he wrote to Anna in 2023. “I believe maintaining this is vital to the future of the English-speaking world.”
His concern was that only Lachlan shared his views. The other three offspring he believed to be worryingly liberal. In particular, he was troubled by the views and activities of James and his wife, Kathryn.
They had given millions to Democratic campaigns and tens of millions to climate-change initiatives, and funded research on disinformation and political extremism. They were never-Trumpers, noted the piece in The Atlantic. Every so often, they caused public embarrassment to the media empire.
On August 2017, after white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”, Fox news defended Trump’s assertion that there were some “very fine people” among the marchers. James made a statement, “I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis.” He said he and his wife would give $1 million to the Anti-Defamation League, and he encouraged others to join them. Rupert and Lachlan remained conspicuously silent.
Another example came in January 2020, as the Black Summer bushfires raged across Australia. The Murdoch media sought to lay the blame on arsonists, not climate change. James gave a statement to The Daily Beast: “Kathryn and James’ views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known. They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary.”
Most pointedly of all, on January 16, 2021, 10 days after the attack on congress by Trump supporters, James and Kathryn issued another statement: “Spreading disinformation – whether about the election, public health, or climate change – has real world consequences. Many media property owners have as much responsibility for this as the elected officials who know the truth but choose instead to propagate lies.”
James’s preparedness to call out the distortions of his family’s media was only one factor fuelling Rupert and Lachlan’s determination to wrest control of the empire for Lachlan.
There also were suggestions that a coup was in the planning. In 2022, an unauthorised biography of Lachlan by Paddy Manning included a quote from an anonymous source: “Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies.”
Other media also carried reports suggesting his siblings could gang up to depose him and take the company in a more centrist, or at least more mainstream conservative, direction.
The empire’s business model relied on giving its audience what it wanted to hear, regardless of objective truth. Rupert and Lachlan feared that if that changed, it would cost audience and revenue.
A killer anecdote underlining that point comes out of the transcript of one of Rupert’s lawyers deposing James for the court case. The questions related to what happened on election night 2020, when Fox was the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden.
The network’s ratings fell sharply. In response, Fox lent heavily into the stolen election narrative, and its ratings recovered.
By The Atlantic’s account, the lawyer asked James whether it was true that Fox was the top cable network because it respected its audience and gave them what they wanted. James said he disagreed with the suggestion that respect and giving people what they want were the same thing.
While Prue and Elisabeth were less inclined to publicly criticise the ideological slant of the family’s media outlets, they were no less hostile to the Rupert–Lachlan plan to subvert the original intent of the trust.
The court documents obtained by the Times revealed that in early December 2023, when Rupert went to them and sketched out the plan, they were aghast.
“You are completely disenfranchising me and my siblings,” Elisabeth told him. “You’ve blown a hole in the family.”
Shortly afterwards at a special meeting of the trust, Elisabeth, who was secretly taping the proceedings, accused her father and brother of “raping” the family company. “You think there’s going to be consensus with a gun to our head?” she said. “If you think that’s harmony, we must be in North Korea.”
Fast forward to Reno last September 16, where the arrival of the warring parties was staged to avoid them meeting outside the courthouse. After hearing evidence from all the parties, in all its excruciating, hostile detail, the probate commissioner for Washoe County, Nevada, Edmund J. Gorman Jr produced a 96-page decision.
As the Times piece noted, he concluded with “a rhetorical flourish worthy of one of Rupert’s own tabloids”.
“The effort was an attempt to stack the deck in Lachlan Murdoch’s favor after Rupert Murdoch’s passing so that his succession would be immutable,” he wrote. “The play might have worked; but an evidentiary hearing, like a showdown in a game of poker, is where gamesmanship collides with the facts and at its conclusion, all the bluffs are called and the cards lie face up.”
He determined that Rupert and Lachlan’s scheme was not put forward in good faith. The dissenting offspring had won. The Times journalists opined there was little likelihood of a successful appeal.
This does not mean there will be any immediate change to the tenor of the Murdoch media. Maybe, when Rupert dies, if the three dissenters don’t sell out, those media will redeem themselves.
By then it could be too late, however. There are new, even more powerful partisan players – most obviously Elon Musk. Right now he is helping Trump dismantle the architecture of American democracy and global stability that Rupert Murdoch, silly old man, thought he was defending.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 22, 2025 as "‘Ghastly Tony Abbott’: Leaks reveal Murdoch family feud".
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