U.S. President Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch.
Kevin Lamarque | Ricky Carioti | Via Reuters
Lawyers for President Donald Trump asked a judge on Monday to order Rupert Murdoch to sit for a deposition within 15 days for Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit accusing the media mogul of defaming him in a Wall Street Journal article about a “bawdy” birthday letter to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump’s lawyers cited Murdoch’s advanced age to submit to questioning under oath as a chief argument in their motion to compel him to testify earlier than would be normal in such a lawsuit, suggesting that Murdoch will either be too ill or dead to testify by the time the case goes 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, New York,” Trump’s lawyers said in their legal filing in Miami federal court.
“Taken together, these factors weigh heavily in determining that Murdoch would be unavailable for in-person testimony at trial,” the lawyers wrote.
The attorneys also cited the fact that there is, as yet, no order scheduling the exchange of evidence and testimony in the case.
“Murdoch has an advantage over President Trump as Murdoch is able to defend himself because he has access to all the information and documents related to the below-defined malicious and defamatory Article, and the decision behind deciding to publish it,” they wrote.
“On the other hand, President Trump has very limited information related to the Article.”
“For these and other reasons that follow, Murdoch would not suffer any prejudice significant enough to outweigh the good cause that exists to grant this Motion,” they wrote.
Murdoch opposes the request that he sit for an expedited deposition, according to the filing.
CNBC has requested comment from Murdoch’s attorneys.
Judge Darrin Gayles, who is presiding over the case, later Monday filed an order directing Murdoch’s lawyers to respond to the motion by Aug. 4.
The motion also seeks a number of documents from Murdoch.
They include any documents exchanged between him and other defendants in the case.
It also seeks “Any text messages, iMessages, WhatsApp messages, Slack messages, Signal messages, WeChat messages, or any other form of digital communication on any mobile device related to the Article that You have sent or received,” and a log of his calls from July 10 through July 25.
The Journal, which is owned by Murdoch’s News Corp, earlier this month published an article saying that Trump sent Epstein a letter for his 50th birthday in 2003.
The newspaper said that the letter “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker.”
“The letter concludes: ‘Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,'” the paper reported.
Trump has angrily denied writing the letter.
His lawsuit against Murdoch also names as defendants News Corp, its CEO Robert Thomson, the Journal’s publisher Dow Jones & Company, and the two reporters whose bylines are on the article, Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo.
The motion filed Monday by Trump’s lawyers also said that when one of the reporters reached out to the White House to ask about the letter, “President Trump reached out to, and spoke directly with, Murdoch and advised him that the letter referenced in the Article was fake.”
“Murdoch advised President Trump that ‘he would take care of it,'” the motion said.
“Because Defendants published the Article after President Trump spoke directly with Murdoch and advised him that the letter referenced in the Article was fake, Murdoch’s direct involvement further underscores Defendants’ actual malice and intent behind the decision to publish the false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements about President Trump identified in the Complaint,” the motion said.
