Plaintiffs argue former Ford CEO was not independent from Murdoch family
A Delaware judge ruled Friday that Fox Corp. must turn over hundreds of documents and years of board records in a long-running shareholders’ lawsuit targeting Rupert Murdoch, his eldest son Lachlan, and former Ford Motor Co. CEO Jacques Nasser. Vice Chancellor Bonnie David issued the ruling in Delaware Chancery Court after Fox’s attorneys tried but failed to convince the judge to shield the records from plaintiffs’ discovery.
The lawsuit, filed three years ago, asks the court to hold Murdoch, his son Lachlan — now Fox’s executive chairman and CEO — and several other board members and executives legally responsible for fostering a business model that the shareholders say has repeatedly exposed the media company to scandal and costly litigation.
The case was sparked by Fox’s nearly $800 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, which had accused the network of spreading conspiracy theories about fraud in the 2020 election. A similar defamation case brought by another voting technology company, Smartmatic USA, remains ongoing, with that company seeking $2.7 billion from Fox.
The shareholders’ complaint also points to an undisclosed settlement with the family of Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee staffer whose 2016 shooting death Fox connected to a story accusing Rich of leaking documents to harm Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — a story Fox later retracted. The lawsuit also cites a phone-hacking scandal that has cost News Corp., a separate Murdoch media company, some $1.5 billion so far. Fox Corp. was split off from News Corp. in the aftermath of that scandal to shield the Murdoch family’s American television licenses from potential challenges, though the family has more recently explored merging the two sides of their empire once more.
At the center of the shareholders’ case is the decades-long relationship between Rupert Murdoch and Jacques Nasser, a former Ford Motor Co. CEO who served on various Murdoch corporate boards for more than two decades, earning six-figure annual compensation. Nasser was designated as an independent director on News Corp., 21st Century Fox and Fox Corp., serving as the latter’s lead independent director until he stepped down in 2023 — the year the Dominion case was settled. The role suggests he would act, when necessary, as a counterweight to the Murdochs, who controlled the company through executive and ownership roles.
The shareholders suing Fox are challenging whether Nasser was acting truly independently. According to the complaint, if evidence reveals that Nasser is so close to the Murdochs that he would make decisions benefiting them over the company itself, then plaintiffs’ lawyers say they have enough to prove that more than half of Fox’s board members were not independent, and the case will likely head to trial.
In a small courtroom in southern Delaware on Friday morning, Fox’s attorneys tried but failed to convince David to let them shield a trove of documents. That trove includes roughly 700 documents containing the phrase “phone hacking,” dozens of board meeting records from Fox Corp. and other organizations, and emails from Nasser’s Ford accounts. Those records could now shed light not only on the relationship between the two Australian-American businessmen and how other Fox board members were selected, but also on how Rupert Murdoch had, for years, deleted text messages that could have been relevant to other legal cases.
Fox’s attorneys noted that Rupert Murdoch had been auto-deleting all of his text messages until about April 2022 — after Dominion had filed its lawsuit against Fox for broadcasting unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. “That documents were deleted wholesale is incorrect,” Anitha Reddy, one of Fox’s attorneys, said in court. She noted that Murdoch typically communicates through email rather than text, but admitted that “there was a period … when text messages were not retained.”
Despite Fox’s effort to withhold the records, David ruled fully in the plaintiffs’ favor. Fox will be forced to hand over a list of all email addresses ever used by Nasser or Rupert Murdoch, as well as years’ worth of Fox board meeting minutes.
The shareholders’ attorneys will also get to review sealed court documents from the Smartmatic case that shed light on Murdoch’s “spoliation” of records — the legal term for destroying evidence, or in this case, deleting text messages. Fox attorneys also accused executives at both Dominion and Smartmatic of destroying evidence in their respective cases and sought sanctions. During the Dominion lawsuit, Dominion’s lawyers had accused several Fox personalities — including Pete Hegseth, who is now defense secretary — and executives of failing to preserve communications such as texts and emails that should have been preserved as part of that case.
Attorneys are also particularly interested in how Nasser supported the Murdochs’ agenda during the decade he spent on the board of British Sky Broadcasting, a British media company better known as BSkyB. In that role, Nasser backed James, Lachlan’s younger brother, as CEO, stood by the Murdochs during the phone-hacking scandal and supported a controversial stock buyback program that, according to court documents, “increased the clout of the Murdoch family.”
Nasser also spent a combined decade as a board director at 21st Century Fox and later Fox Corp. He and Rupert Murdoch are also longtime members of the American Australian Association, which was founded by Murdoch’s father.
Fox did not respond to NPR’s request for comment.