Judge allows Buster Murdaugh’s defamation lawsuit to proceed
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Alex Murdaugh’s surviving son, Buster Murdaugh, was granted a “victory” this week when a federal judge decided to allow his defamation suit against CNN parent company Warner Bros. to proceed, former South Carolina Attorney General Charlie Condon told Fox News Digital.
Court documents filed in the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina on June 9 detail Judge Richard Mark Gergel’s order denying Warner Bros’ and Blackfin Inc.’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which alleges that the media conglomerates “insinuated and implied” in their respective Murdaugh documentary that Buster, now 28, “had murdered a 19-year-old Hampton County man named Stephen Smith.”
Smith — Buster’s former classmate — was found dead on a rural road in Hampton County, where the Murdaugh family is from, in the summer of 2015.
An autopsy later determined that he had been fatally struck by a vehicle in a hit-and-run while he was walking along the run after running out of gas.
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Buster Murdaugh listens to his father Alex Murdaugh’s recorded interview, where he describes a suicide attempt he planned, during Alex Murdaugh’s double murder trial at the Colleton County Courthouse on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2023, in Walterboro, S.C. (Joshua Boucher/The State via AP, Pool)
“[T]here were rumors … Buster Murdaugh was somehow involved in his death, and the basis of the lawsuit is that these media companies — the main claim being something called defamation by implication — that they would take interviews of people living in that area that would, in effect, repeat these rumors about Buster Murdaugh being involved in this murder,” Condon said. “And the lawsuit claims that they just simply aired these interviews of rumors … and would juxtapose those interviews with actual law enforcement documents and related information.”
“I do think that [Buster’s] reputation has been severely damaged by the reporting that went on.”
The defamation suit alleges that Warner Bros and Blackfin, which produced the Warner Bros documentary, implicated Buster in Smith’s death. The media companies tried early on to dismiss it. Fox News Digital has reached out to attorneys for both media companies.
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A photo of the Murdaugh family taken days before Paul and Maggie Murdaugh were shot to death. From left, Buster, Paul, Maggie and Alex Murdaugh. (Defense exhibit)
Buster is arguing that statements regarding Smith’s death made in the documentary about his father’s crimes “are defamatory and falsely accuse the Plaintiff of committing a crime or moral turpitude,” an amended complaint states.
“The claims have been published to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of viewers who watched the show, including viewers in South Carolina, and the defamatory statements continue to be republished as of the filing of this action on a broad array of streaming platforms and channels owned by Defendant Warner Bros.”
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Buster Murdaugh, left, and Stephen Smith, right, a high school classmate that was killed in 2015. (Mark Sims for Fox News Digital/ Facebook)
Warner Bros and Blackfin filed a motion to dismiss on multiple grounds, including the First Amendment, court filings show.
“Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint necessitates dismissal for multiple independent reasons. Plaintiff fails to sufficiently identify the allegedly defamatory content, as the Rules require. … Leaving aside the lack of requisite specificity, the First Amendment bars Plaintiff’s claims as to the Blackfin Documentary because it does not state as a fact that he is ‘the murderer of Stephen Smith’ (which is the only alleged defamation),” attorneys for the two media companies said in their motion to dismiss, among other reasons to dismiss.
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A cross marks the spot where Stephen Smith was found dead, Hampton County, South Carolina, February 28, 2023. Smith’s body was found here in 2015. (Mark Sims for Fox News Digital)
Investigators began probing possible links between Smith’s death and the Murdaugh family after Buster’s mother and brother were both shot to death just miles from the clan’s South Carolina estate in June 2021 but did not find any kind of link between the Murdaughs and Smith’s death.
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Gergel ultimately sided with Buster.
From left, Buster Murdaugh, his mother Maggie Murdaugh, his brother Paul Murdaugh and his father Alex Murdaugh. Alex was found guilty of fatally shooting Maggie, 52, and their son, Paul, 22, June 7, 2021. (Facebook)
“Here, the Court need not decide at this stage which state’s privilege law applies because Plaintiff’s theory of liability does not rest solely on the reporting or republication of law enforcement reports. Rather, Plaintiff alleges that Defendants’ selective juxtaposition of law enforcement interviews with interviews of individuals within Hampton County and reports regarding the Murdaugh family, in tandem, create the defamatory implication that Plaintiff is responsible for Stephen Smith’s death,” the judge wrote in his order. “The Court finds that the fair report privilege does not bar Plaintiff’s lawsuit.”
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Condon called the decision “a real victory for Buster Murdaugh and his legal team that they were able to keep the case alive.”
“A real victory for Buster Murdaugh and his legal team.”
“We’ll see where it goes with discovery,” he said. …I was at the Murdaugh trial for every day for six weeks, and I must say, after that case ended and when these different media companies had different stories circulating about the case and related matters, including the Stephen Smith murder, I wouldn’t know just personally. There were numbers of people that would routinely ask me about Buster Murdaugh being investigated for the murder of Stephen Smith. They would speculate that he’s going to be arrested soon.”
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The Murdaugh family listens to opening statements in Alex Murdaugh’s trial for murder at the Colleton County Courthouse on Wednesday, January 25, 2023. (Joshua Boucher/The State/Pool)
Condon added that the fact that the suit “survived this early stage … is really significant in terms of where this case might head.”
“I do know Judge Gergel would apply the law very rigorously, and the fact that he’s letting these cases go forward tells me that, again, at this very early stage, these cases appear to have merit.” Condon said.
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Buster Murdaugh, the son of Alex Murdaugh, testifies during his father’s trial at the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, S.C., on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023. (Grace Beahm Alford/The Post And Courier via AP, Pool)
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) opened a homicide investigation into Smith’s death June 23, 2021 — about two weeks after Alex Murdaugh fatally shot his wife Maggie, 52, and his son, Paul, 22.
Alex Murdaugh was convicted in Maggie and Paul’s murders in March 2023 and was sentenced to life in prison. The disgraced South Carolina legal scion also pleaded guilty to dozens of financial crimes tied to his family’s personal injury law firm.
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Defense attorney Jim Griffin, left, and Alex Murdaugh look over a document Murdaugh’s double murder trial at the Colleton County Courthouse in Walterboro, SC, on Monday, February 6, 2023. (Jeff Blake/The State/Pool)
Prosecutors said Alex murdered his wife and youngest son to distract from his financial crimes. The now-56-year-old took in clients who had suffered injuries in various accidents and helped them get millions of dollars in damages, most of which he would keep for himself without telling the victims.
Smith’s mother wrote a letter to the FBI in 2016 implicating the Murdaughs in her son’s death, explaining her belief that the Murdaugh family staged the accident in an effort to steal more money.
“The first call my family received after the murder was from authorities notifying us of Stephen’s death,” she wrote at the time. “The second came very quickly the same morning from Solicitor Randolph Murdaugh.”
Twenty-one acres of Moselle Estates, the Murdaugh family’s 1,800-acre hunting lodge property where Maggie and Paul Murdaugh were found dead in 2021, was sold for $1 million. (Crosby Land Company)
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The retired solicitor, who had served as the region’s top prosecutor before retiring in 2005, is the late father of Alex Murdaugh.
He allegedly told Smith’s mother he was willing to work pro bono as a liaison between the family and investigators but soon stopped returning their calls, the letter says. An attorney for the Smith family did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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Buster issued a statement in 2023 through his attorney denying any role in Smith’s death: “These baseless rumors of my involvement in Stephen’s death are false,” he said. “My heart goes out to the Smith family.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Buster’s attorneys for comment regarding Gergel’s order this week.