A judge on the Delaware Court of Chancery has ordered Fox Corporation to hand over to its own shareholders roughly 700 internal documents containing the phrase "phone hacking," along with dozens of board meeting records and emails sent from a director's corporate account at a different company altogether.
The ruling, by Vice Chancellor Bonnie David, was reported by NPR on September 20. It went entirely against Fox: the company failed to persuade the court that the material should stay shielded.
What the shareholders are actually arguing
The case was filed about three years ago by Fox Corp. stockholders against Rupert Murdoch, his son Lachlan and members of the board. The claim is not that any single scandal was mishandled. It is structural: that the Murdochs and the directors around them built and kept a business model that repeatedly exposed the company to scandal and to expensive litigation, and that shareholders paid for it.
For a suit like that to survive, the plaintiffs have to get past a threshold question — whether the board was independent enough to have policed the family in the first place.
That is why one director matters more than the others here. Jacques Nasser, the former chief executive of Ford, is the name the fight has narrowed to. If the plaintiffs can show that Nasser was not independent — that he was aligned closely enough with the Murdochs to put their interests ahead of the company's — then more than half the board would fail the independence test, and the case could move toward trial rather than being dismissed.
The documents just released are the evidence the plaintiffs want for that argument. The emails from Nasser's Ford corporate accounts are in the set for the same reason.
The scandals behind the word "phone hacking"
The search term is not incidental. The 700 documents were identified precisely because they mention the British phone hacking affair, which cost News Corporation on the order of $1.5 billion.
The suit sits alongside a run of other costly episodes:
- the Dominion Voting Systems defamation settlement of 2023, around $800 million;
- the Smartmatic USA case, in which the plaintiff is seeking $2.7 billion and which is still live;
- the retraction of the Seth Rich story, settled for an undisclosed sum.
What Fox says
In court, Fox attorney Anitha Reddy pushed back on the suggestion that records had been destroyed: "That documents were deleted wholesale is incorrect," she said, while acknowledging that there was a period when text messages were not retained.
Fox declined to comment publicly on the ruling.
Why a discovery fight is worth watching. Orders like this one rarely decide a case, and this one did not. What it does is change what the plaintiffs are allowed to read before the court decides whether there is a case at all — and in a company where the central allegation is about who was watching whom, the board's own minutes are the document that matters.
Reporting from NPR, which first published the details of the ruling.
