There’s still life in the old dog yet. At the age of 93, Rupert Murdoch is about to marry for the fifth time. And there’s no doubt what the best, and by far the most expensive, wedding present from his family would be: To shut down Prince Harry’s litigation against Murdoch’s British tabloids over their industrial-scale hacking.
This decades-old saga has already cost News Group Newspapers at least £1.5 billion ($1.9 billion) in settlements and legal costs. The next group of 41 cases, including Prince Harry’s, are due to go to court next January.
Until now the Duke of Sussex has shown no sign of settling out of court. On the back of a huge settlement with the Daily Mirror’s owners, he still wanted to take the adversary he most despises all the way to a trial that would very likely have required Murdoch himself to face cross-examination alongside other top NGN executives.
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The case against Murdoch took a significant—and, for the Murdochs, ominous—turn last month. During a three-day hearing in a London court Harry’s lawyers sought to update their lawsuit to include a tranche of new evidence that they claimed will prove that Murdoch himself and his closest executives knew far more about the hacking operations than they admitted.
More worrying for them was that the attempt to cover up the criminalization of their tabloid newsrooms had superseded in gravity the original crime, as the litigants’ most dangerous new evidence raises the possibility of criminal charges, including obstruction of justice and perjury.
The presiding judge, Mr. Justice Fancourt, said, “If true, these allegations would establish very serious, deliberate wrongdoing at NGN, conducted on an institutional basis on a large scale.” They would also, he said, “establish a concerted effort to conceal wrongdoing.”
This development was telegraphed a year ago when I reported that during the course of discovery, the litigants’ lawyers had found evidence that in 2011, when the breathtaking scale of the hacking by Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, was first revealed, executives had wiped a trail of emails, destroyed hard drives and removed many boxes full of documents.
Revelations about the orchestration of the 2011 cover-up have also included the role played by the current publisher of The Washington Post, Will Lewis, one of Murdoch’s top executives at the time. Late last year, when Jeff Bezos appointed Lewis, he was effusive: “Will embodies the tenacity, energy and vision needed for this role.”
However, included in the new evidence, as first reported by NPR, were emails in which Lewis uses the euphemism “the email migration process” as he confirms that a widespread destruction of evidence is under way – 30 million emails were reportedly deleted. Replying to questions from Post reporters, he said, “I took a view early on that I’m never going to talk about it. And it’s either right or wrong that I’ve done that.”
The full impact of these revelations became clear earlier this month, when Hugh Grant, represented by the same lawyers as Prince Harry, announced that he had settled with NGN for “an enormous sum.” Grant said he had done so because the amount was far larger than anything he would have won if successful in the court case.
He explained, “I would love to see all the allegations they deny tested in court, but the rules around civil litigation mean that if I proceed to trial and the court awards me damages that are even a penny less than the settlement offer I would have to pay the legal costs of both sides. Rupert Murdoch’s lawyers are very expensive. So even if every allegation is proven in court, I would still be liable for something approaching £10 million in costs. I’m afraid I am shying at that fence.”
It’s clear, therefore, that Murdoch was prepared to push the settlement sum so high that it safely exceeded anything likely to be awarded in court. This strategy is in keeping with what happened when Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for defamation, following frequent claims on Fox that the company’s vote-counting machines had been rigged to favor Biden over Trump.
Days before that case was due to open in court, Fox settled for the jaw-dropping sum of $787.5 million. Dominion’s lawyers had unearthed multiple records showing that Fox executives knew the claims were false. It was likely that Murdoch himself would have been called to give evidence in court and, although he had no direct day-to-day oversight of Fox News, it was known he thought the claims were bizarre.
There seems no limit to what it costs to keep Murdoch from being exposed to cross-examination in court, aimed at making it clear that very little of any substance that occurred in his businesses escapes his notice. At the very least, from the onset of the hacking scandal, he’s got away with the “blind eye” defense, leaving no direct fingerprints and, in the tabloid wars, incurious about how it was that his papers had so many scoops.
The one time he was called to public account was in London in 2011 before a House of Commons inquiry into the hacking at the News of the World.
At 80 years old he was still a forceful presence, and under pressure he denied that he was personally responsible for the criminalization of his newsroom. Who was responsible? “The people I trusted to run it… and maybe the people they trusted.” And, with a masterfully thespian effort, he said, “…this is the most humble day of my life.”
But that level of questioning by politicians was a lot less challenging than he would face in court now. And at 93, Murdoch would not relish a public interrogation by lawyers armed with evidence exposing a lot more than was apparent in 2011 about who signed off on the hacking and who was involved in the subsequent cover-up.
For one thing, since 2011 Murdoch and his executives had, through their lawyers, maintained that only the News of the World (which closed down in 2011) was involved in hacking, not their best-selling daily, The Sun. That was never very convincing, and became less so in 2021 when the actress Sienna Miller settled a case with NGN that was specific to The Sun. It has now been rendered absurd because Hugh Grant’s epic settlement also involved The Sun (he made an earlier settlement involving the News of the World).
The part played by The Sun has become highly significant because the editor of The Sun from 2003 to 2009 was, in Murdoch’s eyes, his most valued newspaper executive, Rebekah Brooks, now the CEO of News UK, Murdoch’s remaining newspaper business there. The operation to shield Murdoch from ever appearing in court involves protecting her as much as it does him.
In fact, apart from Murdoch, Brooks is the most inscrutable player in the whole hacking saga. She rose to power in one of the most brutally misogynistic tabloid newsrooms. Once she achieved power her political shrewdness as she courted top politicians was regarded patronizingly by those who could not accept qualities in a woman that were common among male executives. Murdoch, however, was very happy to see the results of her ruthless ascent.
And Brooks proved to have a grasp of something Murdoch was never able to embrace, the need to move journalism from print to digital as advertising drained away to new platforms. The two most valuable titles in London, the daily The Times and the Sunday Times, have successfully made that transition under Brooks, and her hand is also visible in New York at the Wall Street Journal, whose editor-in-chief Emma Tucker was recruited from London, where she was editor of the Sunday Times and a deputy editor of The Times.
It must be a nightmare for Brooks that the stench of the hacking scandal has returned in full force. Hacking is a general term that covers a multitude of malevolent practices: not only the tapping of phones but blagging, the impersonation of people in order to gain access to private records, like medical history; the widespread deployment of unscrupulous private investigators; attaching bugs to cars to trace journeys. In the last year, to retrace this web, the lawyers for litigants have cast a wide net, interviewing more than 200 journalists, executives and private investigators.
Will Prince Harry press on in his declared mission to expose those who commissioned, directed and executed the darkest tabloid arts—or will he receive an offer that even he can’t refuse?
His lawyer, David Sherborne, sounded suddenly equivocal after the Hugh Grant settlement, “The Duke of Sussex is subject to the same issues as Sienna Miller and Hugh Grant have been subject to, which is that offers are made that make it impossible for them to go ahead.”
Rupert Murdoch, no longer involved in running his empire, usually enjoys a level of privacy that his papers rarely allow any celebrity. Last year he started dating Elena Zhukova, a 67-year-old retired molecular biologist, who is the mother of Dasha Zhukova, the former wife of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Their marriage appears to be imminent. Such are the circles in which Murdoch moves.
The Murdoch family is one of the wealthiest media dynasties, on a par in wealth with the barons of the Gilded Age. In 2019 the patriarch pulled off the deal of his life, selling 21st Century Fox and major television assets to Disney for $71.3 billion—that’s $10 billion more than the aid package just assigned to Ukraine, or roughly equal to the GDP of Luxembourg.
All that money has coursed through the bank accounts of the Murdoch clan, enriching them to an extent nobody could have imagined when Murdoch launched his career from a small provincial paper in Adelaide, Australia. The businesses can well absorb the costs of making sure that the secrets of the hacking scandal go to the grave with Murdoch.
That is, unless they feel a little touch of Harry in the night.
