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On Dec. 7, Rupert formally filed his petition to strip Prue, Liz and James of their voting power. The three children quickly filed an objection, arguing that their father was abusing the narrow amendment that enables him to make changes to the family trust. Though the public was still unaware of the escalating turmoil roiling the family, the legal battle was now underway.
Since leaving the family empire, James had become a private investor, backing media firms, A.I. start-ups and a cannabis-edibles company. He was also a board member at Tesla and hired one of the automaker’s law firms, the heavy-hitting Cravath Swaine & Moore, to represent him and his sisters. Strategically speaking, time was on their side; they just needed to tie things up long enough to preserve the existing structure. As Angelo told James, his father’s managing directors to the trust would “go poof” once he was dead. “If the new trustees have not been created, he cannot name one from beyond the grave.”
Rupert brought aboard his own high-profile litigator, Adam Streisand, a specialist in succession battles who had secured Jeanie Buss’s control of the Los Angeles Lakers in the face of an attempted coup by her brothers. In June, amid the flurry of depositions, subpoenas and legal briefs, Rupert, now 93, married his fifth wife, a 67-year-old retired molecular biologist, Elena Zhukova, at his vineyard in the hills of Bel Air. Lachlan and Barr were both in attendance, but Prue and Liz sent their regrets. Liz would say later that it would have been “too painful” to be there. James would say that he hadn’t been invited.
The case fell under the jurisdiction of the probate commissioner for Washoe County, Nev., Edmund J. Gorman Jr. He placed the case under such a tight seal that it didn’t even appear under its anonymized name — “In the Matter of Doe 1 Trust” — on the court’s docket. After reviewing the early briefs, Gorman ruled that Rupert had the right to change the trust. To do so, though, he would first need to prove that the change was being done in good faith and for the “sole benefit” of his beneficiaries. And he would need to do that at trial in September.
In late July, the public learned for the first time about the legal battle over the Murdoch family trust when we obtained a copy of Gorman’s opinion and reported on the broad outlines of the case. After our article was published, The Times’s legal counsel led a lawsuit to open the court proceedings to the media, arguing that the battle over the future of the Murdoch empire is a matter of public interest. Its outcome could very well determine the future of two multibillion-dollar publicly traded companies, not to mention affect many millions of media consumers and reshape the American political landscape. A district judge rejected the request, ruling that Rupert had brought his action in the Nevada courts under the expectation that it would remain confidential.
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