It’s awards season in the US and for the past seven years the glittering prizes have gone to the HBO series Succession, with its brutal storyline of a disintegrating, dysfunctional media company seeming to win virtually every accolade going until its final episode in 2023 was aired.
How its brilliant show-runners must today be yearning to turn back the clock as the bitter divides ripping apart the Rupert Murdoch dynasty, said to be the real-life inspiration for the fictional drama, run deeper and more preposterously than anything its creative sparks would dare to dream up for TV.
Surely, not even in their version of rich people being dreadful could the scriptwriters have conjured up the extraordinary scene which unfolded in a New York conference room last March.
As revealed this week, James Murdoch – once his father’s heir apparent, now cast as the family black sheep – faced a barrage of ‘withering’ questions from a lawyer suggesting that he and his sisters were ‘white, privileged, multi-billionaire trust-fund babies’.
‘Have you done anything successful on your own?’ was one.
‘Why were you too busy to say Happy Birthday to your father when he turned 90?’ was another.
And ‘Does it strike you, that in your account, everything that goes wrong is always somebody else’s fault?’
The questions, it soon dawned on him, were not really coming from the attorney at all but were being silently texted to counsel by his father from across the table.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch poses for a photograph with his sons Lachlan and James in London, Britain March 5, 2016
Rupert Murdoch at his annual party at Spencer House, St James’ Place in London
Matthew Freud (L) and Elisabeth Murdoch attend a private view of ‘Portraits’, a new exhibition by Jonathan Yeo, at the National Portrait Gallery on September 10, 2013 in London, England
‘How f*****g twisted is that?’ the younger man observed after leaving the meeting in which he was also obliged to listen to a passage from a book about the clan which suggested that James was ‘a conniving saboteur’.
As with all great empires, the saga of the feuding Murdochs has been beset by hubris, accusations and blame and – just like the scheming Roys in Succession – its family members are turning bitterly on one another.
Even so, revelations in the US-based Atlantic magazine have revealed an eyebrow-raising litany of betrayals, leaks, conspiracies, humiliations and tears, while plunging into the mind games that have brought the once close family into open feuding.
‘He is a misogynist,’ it quotes James saying of his father.
While Rupert’s beloved Fox News channel is labelled by his son as a blight on his family’s name, a ‘menace’ to American democracy.
For Murdoch senior, now 93, securing his legacy has become an all-consuming life-and-death struggle. He believed that James was plotting with his sisters, Prudence and Elisabeth, to seize control of the family’s News Corp companies as soon as he died, ousting his elder son Lachlan – whom he anointed his chosen successor – and in the process changing the editorial stance of outlets such as the Donald Trump-supporting Fox News .
He feared they would destroy his life’s work. This belief drove him to attempt to overturn the terms of a long-standing family trust that would bequeath his vast conglomerate to his four elder children equally, which had been devised, said James, because ‘it would incentivise us to co-operate’.
But Murdoch, fearing a diluting of his outlets’ robust views would be commercially disastrous, had decided that Lachlan, who was said to share his conservative viewpoint, should inherit.
James Murdoch (left) , Deputy Chief Operating Officer and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, International News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, News Corporation giving evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in the House of Commons in central London on the News of the World phone-hacking scandal
James Murdoch, the son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and his wife Kathryn Hufschmid attend the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., July 8, 2022
The proposal had been put in a piquant but ultimately woefully misleadingly-named document called ‘Project Family Harmony’. It didn’t achieve that; it only offered discord. In December last year, matters turned again when Murdoch lost a subsequent court battle to force the proposals through and hand the reins to Lachlan.
As the case in Reno, Nevada, got more and more acrimonious, James and his sisters offered their father an olive branch, however.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving and Christmas they wrote to Murdoch: ‘We are asking you with love to find a way to put an end to this destructive judicial path so that we can have a chance to heal as a collaborative and loving family.’ According to The Atlantic, Murdoch replied that he had read his children’s testimony from the trial twice over, ‘only to conclude that I was right’.
Devastatingly, he added that they should contact his lawyers if they wanted to talk to him. His reply ended, ‘Much love, Dad.’
Shortly afterwards, the judge issued his ruling: Rupert and Lachlan had lost.
The explosive revelations in The Atlantic reveal a rift so deep that many observers believe it can never be healed. Few in the dramatis personae escape unscathed from what a friend of James’s ex-model wife Kathryn describes as an ‘ideological knife fight’.
The magazine reports how both James and Lachlan had objected to their father’s marriage to his third wife, Wendi Deng – after divorcing their mother Anna in 1999. It reports that the brothers believed Ms Deng, an executive at a News Corp subsidiary in Hong Kong, ‘couldn’t be trusted, and suspected that she might even have ties to Chinese intelligence’.
Ms Deng, said The Atlantic had denied this but James’s suspicions persisted. ‘More than two decades later, Kathryn would joke that Deng used “CCP[Chinese Communist Party]-issued burner phones” to evade a subpoena in the trust litigation,’ the article said.
The family were also said to be wary of Elisabeth’s former husband and public relations company boss Matthew Freud, described in the article as ‘an intense, unnervingly slick PR executive from London’, because of his constant ‘flaunting of social connections and his gleeful loutishness’.
Kathryn Hufschmid and James Murdoch attend the 2024 Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted By Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on March 10, 2024
Lachlan Murdoch, co-chairman of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc., left, and James Murdoch, chief executive officer of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc., arrive for the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., on Tuesday, July 5, 2016
Kathryn is quoted as saying of Freud: ‘I cannot exaggerate what a terrible person he is.’
She told the magazine that when they first met Freud tried to convince her ‘that it was morally defensible for a man to cheat on his pregnant wife’.
Even the dynastic drama portrayed in Succession was woven into this extraordinary family meltdown. The show’s popularity had led to speculation about the real-life scheming among the Murdochs, which in turn appeared to induce near paranoia among the family.
The Atlantic writer, McKay Coppins, discloses how he heard endless speculation about which family members might have leaked to the show’s writers: ‘James and Kathryn, I was told, thought his sister Liz was responsible. Liz swore she wasn’t, though for a while she was convinced her ex-husband was talking with the writers – and in fact she later learned that he’s repeatedly offered his services, but the show-runner Jesse Armstrong had declined.’
As for James, he was said to have found the drama ‘too painful’ and only watched one episode. ‘But other members of the Murdoch clan were obsessed with the show; certain storylines seemed uncannily true to life.’
In a near 14,000-word article, The Atlantic provides a tantalising glimpse of a family rarely seen beyond them stepping from private jets or emerging from limousines to board luxury yachts. James claimed that at one stage one of his father’s lawyers had included a quote from King Lear in a document – ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’
But the truth is this epic drama has more in common with Greek tragedy than Shakespeare.
Over the years, power and control over the various parts of the empire had shifted between Lachlan and James as both were seen as possible heirs.
At certain times James was the golden boy, not Lachlan. Their sisters were never considered serious contenders to run the business, according to James, because his father didn’t believe his adult daughters ‘are capable of making decisions’. It was this that triggered James’s ‘misogynist’ claim.
James Murdoch and Kathryn Hufschmid Murdoch attend the 2020 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 09, 2020
Even the dynastic drama portrayed in Succession was woven into this extraordinary family meltdown
Coppins’s interview details all the family struggles, including James’s discomfort with the company’s support for Brexit and Donald Trump. Naturally, it is sympathetic to the conflicts James confronted over the way his father’s outlets dealt with other issues such as the climate crisis and Fox News’s embrace of Right-wing conspiracy theories.
As James’s relationship with his father disintegrated, The Atlantic reports that father and son had barely spoken for years. But it then quotes a handwritten note from Rupert delivered along with the legal documents: ‘Dear James, is there still time to talk? Love, Dad. PS: I would love to see my grandchildren someday.’
The magazine notes: ‘James, who could not remember the last time Rupert had taken an interest in his grandchildren, did not bother to respond.’
There had been other attempts to solve family disagreements. In 2010, Murdoch invited his children to a counselling retreat at his ancestral ranch in Australia with a specially hired therapist. The purpose was not to discuss succession-planning but rather how they all behaved with one another.
A leak to Vanity Fair magazine described it as a ‘loving, supportive’ experience. But Coppins reports that the session ‘devolved into posturing, gaslighting and recriminations’. James tells him: ‘It was a car crash. Everyone was more alienated from each other at the end.’
His father, he added, ‘was always trying to pull everyone into the company so that he could manipulate them against each other’.
All the same, at the end of the retreat the family agreed to sign a draft of a ‘family constitution’, an attempt to codify Murdoch family values. All four siblings signed it.
The document talked of them communicating with one another with ‘trust and humility’ and being ‘vigilant’ to ‘defend against divisiveness’. All very noble but, as The Atlantic reports, within months ‘the Murdochs would be at each other’s throats’.
Yet, according to the article, instead of James, Murdoch senior could have become estranged from Lachlan. Angered by his father’s 2019 plan to sell 21st Century Fox film and TV studios to Disney – a deal that earned Murdoch £54 billion – he told him that, if it went through: ‘You won’t have a son.’ And, turning to James, added: ‘And you won’t have a brother.’ In the end, a son and brother were lost – but not the one they thought.
A spokesperson for Murdoch and Lachlan described James’s claims in the interview as a ‘litany of falsehoods . . . from a person who no longer works for the companies but still benefits financially’.
As for the controversial trust, a review of 3,000 pages of evidence from the Nevada trial, has, intriguingly, revealed that it will expire in 2030, when Murdoch is 99.
At that point – or at the tycoon’s death – the brothers (and sisters) will have to decide what to do.
