Lachlan Murdoch Drops Defamation Lawsuit Against Australian Publisher

SYDNEY—Fox Corp. Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Lachlan Murdoch ended a defamation lawsuit against an Australian media firm, just days after his company settled a separate high-profile dispute with Dominion Voting Systems in the U.S.

Mr. Murdoch launched legal proceedings against Private Media Pty Ltd. in August, alleging that he was defamed around two months earlier by an opinion article that ran on Crikey, an online news site owned by Private Media, because it linked his family to the Jan. 6 Capitol riots in the U.S. The article, written by Crikey’s political editor Bernard Keane about the congressional investigation into the riots, ran under the headline, “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator.”

Private Media rejected the claim that the article had defamed Mr. Murdoch and the case was due to go to trial in federal court in Sydney in October. In its defense, lodged with the court last year, Private Media said the references to the Murdoch family were “self-evidently hyperbolic” and that it used creative license to pick up on a U.S. grand jury’s naming of then-President Richard Nixon in 1974 as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Watergate scandal.

“No one would read the words literally as suggesting that the Murdochs were guilty of criminal conspiracy or treason under U.S. law,” the defense filing said.

On Friday, Mr. Murdoch’s attorney, John Churchill, filed a notice with the federal court stating that the Fox chief executive was discontinuing the proceedings.

In a statement, Mr. Churchill said Mr. Murdoch was confident that he would have won the case at trial.

“However, he does not wish to further enable Crikey’s use of the court to litigate a case from another jurisdiction that has already been settled and facilitate a marketing campaign designed to attract subscribers and boost their profits,” he said, in an apparent reference to the Fox-Dominion settlement.

Crikey, in a statement on its website, called the decision a victory for public interest journalism and said it stood by the original article.