A Nevada judge has ruled that billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his family can hold a secret court battle over the future of his vast media empire behind closed doors.
The judge rejected a petition by a coalition of media organizations, including CNN, The New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, Reuters and ABC, to unseal the case and allow access.
Though the Murdoch family is fighting over the trust and who will ultimately have control of the family businesses after the 93-year-old’s death, all of those involved agreed to sealing the case.
Nevada offers one of the most private court settings for issues like family trust decisions, allowing parties and judges to lock the cases behind closed doors to such an extreme degree that their very existence is not even publicized on court dockets. The existence of the case remained under wraps until The New York Times first reported on it in July. In a now-public docket, the case is only identified as “The Matter of the Doe 1 Trust, PR23-00813“.
Attorneys for the family members said in court filings that the case should remain sealed because it would otherwise reveal confidential information related to Murdoch’s business, which includes companies like the right-wing cable outlet Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, and could jeopardize Murdoch’s physical safety.
The judge agreed, writing, “A family trust like the one at issue in this case, even when it is a stockholder in publicly traded companies, is essentially a private legal arrangement, as the applicable sealing statues recognize.”
