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Viet Dinh, the top lawyer at Fox Corporation and close family friend and confidant of chief executive Lachlan Murdoch, will exit the company this year following the media group’s $787.5mn settlement of defamation claims by Dominion Voting Systems.
Dinh guided the company’s legal strategy in the Dominion suit, which in April ended with one of the biggest defamation settlements in US history. The voting technology company had accused the Fox News television network of airing conspiracy theories about fraud in the 2020 US presidential election.
The settlement was far less than the $1.6bn that Dominion had sought in damages, but emails and texts produced during the discovery process proved to be embarrassing for the news network and its executives including Lachlan Murdoch and his father Rupert, the Fox chair. Tucker Carlson, a top Fox host, left the network shortly after the settlement was announced.
A Harvard-trained lawyer who worked in president George W Bush’s administration, Dinh was seen as having significant power within Fox. Dinh is godfather to one of Lachlan’s children and had the same $3mn base salary as he earned.
Dinh had argued that Fox had a strong free speech defence in the Dominion case, a stance Lachlan Murdoch said he agreed with after the settlement.
“We have been and remain confident in the merits of our position, that the first amendment protects a news organisation’s reporting on newsworthy events,” Murdoch said in May.
Dinh would receive a lump-sum payment of $23mn, Fox said in a filing on Friday. He would also remain an adviser to the company until 2025, a role that would pay him $2.5mn a year.
“We appreciate Viet’s many contributions and service to Fox as both a board member of 21st Century Fox and in his role over the last five years as a valued member of Fox’s leadership team,” Lachlan Murdoch said in a statement.
In a statement, Dinh said he had “treasured my relationships with Rupert, Lachlan and our talented colleagues”.