Right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch has agreed to give Donald Trump regular health updates in a deal to postpone Murdoch’s deposition in the president’s $10 billion lawsuit over a Wall Street Journal article about a “bawdy” birthday letter Trump allegedly wrote to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The deal comes a week after the president’s lawyers called on the 94-year-old Murdoch to be deposed within the next 15 days due to his advanced age and health problems over the years, implying that the Fox News founder could die before the case went to trial.
“Murdoch is 94 years old, has suffered from multiple health issues throughout his life, is believed to have suffered recent significant health scares, and is presumed to live in New York,” the Trump team’s motion stated last week. “Taken together, these factors weigh heavily in determining that Murdoch would be unavailable for in-person testimony at trial.”
With the president’s attorneys adding that it was “presumable” that Murdoch would be “unavailable for trial” due to his age and health, along with the fact that the lawsuit was filed in Florida, the judge in the case ordered Murdoch to respond to the request by August 4.
Per court filings, a joint deal was reached on Monday night to postpone the expedited deposition of Murdoch, whose massive media conglomerate News Corp. owns the Wall Street Journal. According to the order adopting the stipulation, the deposition will be postponed and the parties agree not to engage in discovery until the WSJ’s motion to dismiss has been decided.
“If Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss the Complaint is denied, then Defendant Murdoch’s deposition shall occur in person, at a mutually agreed upon location in the United States, within thirty (30) calendar days of the order denying the Motion to Dismiss,” the order further notes.
Additionally, Murdoch must provide “a sworn declaration describing his current health condition” within three days of the order of stipulation being filed and give “regularly scheduled updates” about his health to the president. The order was signed Tuesday by Judge Darrin Gayles.
“Failure to provide updates in the agreed-upon manner, as set forth in the Abatement Agreement, shall result in an expedited deposition of Defendant Murdoch,” the order adds.
The president sued the WSJ and Murdoch on July 18, a day after the paper ran its bombshell report that Trump had given Epstein a raunchy card for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. The letter, which the president has called a “fake thing,” reportedly contains a drawing of a naked woman with Trump’s signature mimicking pubic hair.
Trump has publicly fumed that Murdoch, with whom he’s had a complicated on-again/off-again mutually beneficial friendship, had promised him “he would take care of” killing the WSJ story, but apparently “did not have the power to do so.”
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has stood by its story and followed it with another blockbuster the following week by revealing that Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump in May that his name appeared several times in the Epstein files. That story only increased the amount of scrutiny the administration has faced for reversing course last month and refusing to release additional documents in the disgraced financier’s case. A name appearing in the files is not an indication of wrongdoing.
Behind the scenes, Murdoch has also indicated that he isn’t all that willing to back down in the face of the president’s legally specious defamation suit. “I’m 94 years old and I will not be intimidated,” he reportedly told associates.
Despite the WSJ looking to dismiss the complaint and Murdoch suggesting that he’s in the fight for the long haul, Trump has claimed that the conservative media titan wants to reach a settlement.
“I have been treated very unfairly by The Wall Street Journal on everything,” the president said last week. “I would assume Rupert Murdoch controls it, but maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. And they are talking to us about doing something, but we’ll see what happens. They would like us to drop that. So we’ll see… They want to settle it.”
