Rupert Murdoch scored an invite to the U.K.’s royal banquet for President Donald Trump on Wednesday as his newspaper fights the president’s eleven-figure defamation lawsuit.
Murdoch has had a rocky relationship with Trump and the royal family, but still attended the ritzy event at Windsor Castle. The 94-year-old was placed on the same side of the table as Queen Camila and the Prince of Wales, The Telegraph reported.
Murdoch sat between his fifth wife, Elena, and Morgan McSweeney, the chief of staff for Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
The president did not mention his friend-turned-foe during his remarks.
In July, President Trump—who is making an unprecedented second state visit to the U.K.—sued Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal over an article the paper published about Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
The report described a bawdy birthday letter Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein in 2003, which was later released along with the rest of Epstein’s “birthday book” earlier this month.
Trump described the letter, which includes the outline of a naked woman and a signature made out to resemble pubic hair, as “a fake thing” and promptly filed a defamation suit seeking no less than $10 billion.
“I look forward to getting Rupert Murdoch to testify in my lawsuit against him and his ‘pile of garbage’ newspaper, the WSJ,” Trump wrote on Truth Social the day the suit was filed. “That will be an interesting experience!!!!”
A federal judge in Florida is waiting on a motion from Murdoch to dismiss the suit, which is due by September 22.
In the meantime, Trump is forcing the elderly Murdoch to provide the judge with regular health updates due to his advanced age and “recent significant health scares.”
Throughout his seven-decade career, Murdoch’s numerous media properties—including Fox News and The Wall Street Journal—have chronicled Trump’s rise from real estate developer to TV host to Commander-in-Chief.
Trump was a fixture in the celebrity gossip columns of the Murdoch-owned New York Post in the 1990s, and the president and Murdoch have reportedly been friends for decades.
Murdoch did not immediately support Trump in the 2016 election. Still, Fox News eventually fell strongly in line behind the MAGA agenda—so much so that Fox agreed to pay nearly $800 million to settle a defamation lawsuit related to false claims its stars made about the 2020 election.
The aging patriarch has had a similarly topsy-turvy relationship with the British elite.
Murdoch was educated in England and is believed to have brokered a strategic alliance with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, allegedly securing her support for his acquisition of two London broadsheets in exchange for favorable coverage in those papers.
Some of the mogul’s British papers have been accused of illicit practices like hacking the phones of article subjects, leading to multiple journalists from the Murdoch-owned News of the World being criminally prosecuted. The newspaper ceased its operations in 2011.
In January, Murdoch’s company News Group Newspapers settled with Prince Harry for more than 1 billion pounds in a similar phone-hacking suit.
The company also put out an apology admitting that private investigators working for The Sun, another British paper in the Murdoch portfolio, carried out “incidents of unlawful activities” between 1996 and 2011.
The settlement fulfilled a years-long effort by the Duke of Sussex to expose Murdoch’s “lies and manipulation to the public.”
Harry was not in attendance at Windsor Castle on Wednesday, where he would have seen President Trump extol his brother William, but make no mention of him.
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