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Viet Dinh, the highest lawyer at Fox Company and shut household buddy and confidant of chief government Lachlan Murdoch, will exit the corporate this yr following the media group’s $787.5mn settlement of defamation claims by Dominion Voting Methods.
Dinh guided the corporate’s authorized technique within the Dominion swimsuit, which in April ended with one of many largest defamation settlements in US historical past. The voting expertise firm had accused the Fox News tv community of airing conspiracy theories about fraud within the 2020 US presidential election.
The settlement was far lower than the $1.6bn that Dominion had sought in damages, however emails and texts produced throughout the discovery course of proved to be embarrassing for the information community and its executives together with Lachlan Murdoch and his father Rupert, the Fox chair. Tucker Carlson, a high Fox host, left the community shortly after the settlement was introduced.
A Harvard-trained lawyer who labored in president George W Bush’s administration, Dinh was seen as having important energy inside Fox. Dinh is godfather to certainly one of Lachlan’s youngsters and had the identical $3mn base wage as he earned.
Dinh had argued that Fox had a robust free speech defence within the Dominion case, a stance Lachlan Murdoch stated he agreed with after the settlement.
“We have now been and stay assured within the deserves of our place, that the primary modification protects a information organisation’s reporting on newsworthy occasions,” Murdoch stated in Might.
Dinh would obtain a lump-sum fee of $23mn, Fox stated in a submitting on Friday. He would additionally stay an adviser to the corporate till 2025, a task that may pay him $2.5mn a yr.
“We admire Viet’s many contributions and repair to Fox as each a board member of twenty first Century Fox and in his position during the last 5 years as a valued member of Fox’s management crew,” Lachlan Murdoch stated in a press release.
In a press release, Dinh stated he had “treasured my relationships with Rupert, Lachlan and our gifted colleagues”.
