More of the Murdoch family’s betrayals, leaks, “mind games”, manipulations, machinations and humiliations have been laid bare, in the wake of a messy court trial that offered tantalising glimpses inside the dynasty.
The American journalist McKay Coppins this weekend published a rare and wide-ranging interview with James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s second-oldest son, who is often portrayed as a bitter rival to his older brother, Lachlan.
What Coppins did not know when he and James began speaking in early 2024, he writes, was that “the Murdochs were in the midst of a private meltdown” – the nasty court battle over the future of media behemoth News Corp, kicked off by the somewhat misleadingly titled “Project Family Harmony”.
The plan saw Rupert inform James, and his sisters, Prudence and Elisabeth, that he was anointing Lachlan as heir. On Rupert’s death, instead of the evenly split family trust previously planned, power would go solely to his older son.
He lost his effort to hand the reins to Lachlan in December last year.
Detailing the many power struggles within the family, Coppins writes that one former News Corp employee claimed Lachlan had referred to the media side of the business as “ShitCo” (a claim a spokesperson for Lachlan denied to Coppins) – a possible echo of RoyCo, the fictional company created by patriarch Logan Roy in HBO’s Succession, commonly regarded as having been inspired by the Murdochs.
When discussing why the battle for succession saw Rupert pit James and Lachlan against each other, leaving Prudence and Elisabeth on the sidelines, the Atlantic piece quotes James calling his father a “misogynist”.
For years, as power and control waxed and waned between the male Murdochs over various parts of the organisation, there had been reports of James’ unease with News Corp’s reporting of the climate crisis and Fox News’s apparent embrace of rightwing conspiracy theories. Coppins’ interview details all of it, including James’ discomfort with the company’s support of Brexit and of Donald Trump, and prevarications on Charlottesville.
It was Australia’s 2019-20 bushfires that prompted a rare public sign of the split. In a statement, James and his wife, Kathryn Hufschmid, shared their frustration with News Corp and Fox’s coverage.
“They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary,” their spokesperson said in a statement at the time.
Later in 2020, James resigned from the News Corp board.
Coppins’ interview traces the relationship between James and his father as it disintegrated.
By the time of the court battle, “James and Rupert had barely spoken in years,” the piece says, then detailing a handwritten note from Rupert delivered along with legal documents:
Dear James, still time to talk? Love, Dad. P.S.: Love to see my grandchildren one day.
“James, who could not remember the last time Rupert had taken an interest in his grandchildren, didn’t bother to reply,” Coppins notes.
Coppins also describes a series of “withering questions” put to James by Rupert’s lawyer in court.
“Have you ever done anything successful on your own?” the lawyer asked James, according to the Atlantic, also referring to him and his sisters as “white, privileged, multibillionaire trust-fund babies”.
James, Coppins writes, realised Rupert, who was seated silently, was texting the questions to the lawyer.
“How fucking twisted is that?” he asks Coppins.
At Thanksgiving 2024, after the trial had finished, James and his sisters wrote a letter to their father saying they missed and loved him.
“Put an end to this destructive judicial path so that we can have a chance to heal as a collaborative and loving family,” they pleaded, according to the Atlantic.
Rupert, the piece goes on, said they should contact his lawyers if they wanted to talk to him.
A spokesperson for Rupert and Lachlan described James’ claims in the interview as a “litany of falsehoods … from someone who no longer works for the companies but still benefits from them financially”.
Last week, New York Times Magazine reporters scoured through 3,000 pages of evidence from the trial, and reported that the trust will expire in 2030. At that point, or when Rupert dies, the siblings have to work out what to do next.
Coppins writes that James is now struggling with the question: “How did we let it come to this?”
“His 93-year-old father will, despite his most fervent wishes, die one day,” he writes.
“And when he does, he will leave behind a family at war with itself.”
