In the legal filings — and on social media — Trump says he personally told media mogul Rupert Murdoch that the racy birthday greeting he had supposedly sent two decades earlier to the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein had been faked and did not exist. Murdoch's Journal reported it anyway, despite Trump's warning.
Now, Trump is asking a federal judge in Miami to compel the man he once called "my very good friend Rupert Murdoch" to answer his lawyers' questions under oath within 15 days of the order. Trump's legal team acknowledges that the ink is barely dry on the lawsuit — there is no schedule of court deadlines yet — but argues that Murdoch is unlikely to testify in person whenever a trial occurs due to his advanced age and health issues.
"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," the filing states. "Taken together, these factors weigh heavily in determining that Murdoch would be unavailable for in-person testimony at trial."
The filing repeatedly stresses Murdoch's age and cites health setbacks, including a reported collapse during a breakfast in London in 2023 with the chief executive of his British holdings, Rebekah Brooks. The judge has ordered Murdoch — the only person Trump asked to be compelled to submit to an accelerated deposition — to respond by the end of Monday.
"The way it's being framed is almost sarcastic," says Joseph Azam, a former senior vice president and legal executive for Murdoch's newspaper and publishing empire. "It's classic Trump. He is using lawfare, to use his own term, to silence people.
"The problem is he's going after people who are equally equipped — and in some ways, I would say, better equipped — to navigate this stuff," Azam tells NPR. The unusual demand to seek an urgent deposition of Rupert Murdoch — and only Rupert Murdoch — feels like "a gratuitous attempt to poke the bear," Azam says.
This lawsuit is definitely a distraction, a waste of an incomprehensible amount of money and legal resources (definitely being paid for with our tax dollars), and amounts to a passive aggressive cat fight between two horrible old men with way too much money. But, "a gratuitous attempt to poke the bear" is also Trump's entire personality, and why we're watching him flounder while trying to get people to forget the issue he promised to expose.