Judge Orders Fox to Turn Over Documents in Shareholder Suit
A Delaware judge has ordered Fox Corp. to hand over hundreds of documents that could reveal how founder Rupert Murdoch and a key board director handled major scandals at the media company over the past two decades, NPR reported. The ruling, issued Friday by Vice Chancellor Bonnie David of the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware, went fully in favor of shareholders in a case that could ultimately reach trial.
The order in In re Fox Corporation Derivative Litigation (Case No. 2023-0418) compels the company to produce around 700 documents containing the phrase “phone hacking,” decades of board meeting minutes, and emails from the Ford Motor Co. accounts of Jacques Nasser, the company’s former lead independent director, according to Cohen Milstein, which leads the plaintiffs alongside co-counsel Friedlander & Gorris and Lieff Cabraser.
A Case Rooted in Fox’s Scandals
The derivative lawsuit was filed three years ago by Fox stockholders seeking to hold Murdoch, his eldest son Lachlan — now executive chairman and CEO — and several other board members and executives accountable for a business model that repeatedly exposed the company to scandal and costly litigation.
The case was sparked by the nearly $787.5 million settlement Fox paid to Dominion Voting Systems in April 2023, on the first day of a jury trial, after the network aired false claims about fraud in the 2020 presidential election. A similar defamation suit brought by election technology company Smartmatic USA, seeking $2.7 billion, is still ongoing, NPR has reported.
According to the plaintiffs, Fox News leadership breached its fiduciary duties by promoting or endorsing defamation rather than following written standards for what it broadcast, treating potential tort claims and settlements as a cost of doing business.
The shareholder complaint also points to other episodes, including an undisclosed settlement with the family of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer whose 2016 shooting death Fox linked without evidence to the party before retracting its story, and a British phone hacking scandal that has cost the Murdochs’ News Corp. roughly $1.5 billion to date.
Why Nasser Is Central
The shareholders’ entire case now hinges on what their lawyers can learn about the decades-long relationship between Rupert Murdoch and Nasser, the former Ford Motor Co. CEO who served as lead independent director of Fox Corp. until 2023 — the same year the Dominion case was settled.
Nasser’s title suggested he would act, when necessary, as a counterweight to the Murdochs, who controlled the company through both executive and ownership roles. For the suit to succeed, shareholders must show that more than half of Fox’s board members were not independent of the family — a threshold that turns largely on whether Nasser was truly independent.
If the evidence shows Nasser was close enough to the Murdochs to favor their interests over the company’s, plaintiffs will likely have what they need to take the case to trial.
Among the records Fox must now produce is a list of all email addresses ever used by Nasser or Rupert Murdoch, as well as sealed court documents from the Smartmatic case that shed light on Murdoch’s “spoliation” of records — the legal term for destroying evidence.
Spoliation Allegations and Fox’s Defense
Fox’s attorneys argued in a small courtroom in southern Delaware that the company should be allowed to shield the documents. They noted that Rupert Murdoch had been auto-deleting his text messages until about April 2022, after Dominion had filed its suit.
“That documents were deleted wholesale is incorrect,” Fox attorney Anitha Reddy said, according to NPR. She noted that Murdoch typically communicates by email rather than text, though she acknowledged “there was a period … when text messages were not retained.”
During the Dominion litigation, the voting technology company’s lawyers accused several Fox personalities — including Pete Hegseth, now the U.S. defense secretary — and executives of failing to preserve communications that should have been kept for the case. Fox did not respond to NPR’s request for comment on the latest ruling.
Judicial Skepticism Toward the Murdochs
The ruling caps a series of setbacks for Fox in the litigation. In December 2024, Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss, finding that the plaintiffs’ allegations were sufficient to support a reasonable inference that Rupert Murdoch faces a substantial risk of liability for breaching his duty of loyalty by deciding in bad faith to have the company violate the law.
Laster was even more pointed about Lachlan Murdoch, writing that “if anything, the claim against Lachlan is stronger” because he communicated more frequently with Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News, and “regularly texted comments to Scott” about the network’s coverage.
The court also found that the board was too conflicted to independently consider the shareholders’ claims — a demand futility finding that allowed the derivative suit to proceed without first requiring shareholders to petition the board itself.
What to Watch
The discovery order does not guarantee a trial, but it substantially expands the universe of evidence plaintiffs can use to argue that Fox’s governance failed shareholders. Fox retains a pending avenue to narrow the case: in April 2025, the court granted the company leave to seek targeted summary judgment solely on the question of whether Nasser was independent of Rupert Murdoch.
As Law360 reported, Fox has also pressed the court to set boundaries on discovery, arguing that shareholders’ counsel sought an “overbroad” probe. How the court resolves those disputes — and what the newly ordered documents reveal about the Murdochs’ relationship with their longest-serving independent director — will determine whether this case, like Dominion’s before it, ends in another costly settlement or goes to trial.