https://archive.ph/QroYA Dear Reader,

When I first approached James Murdoch in early 2024 to pitch him on a series of in-depth interviews, I figured it was a long shot. Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, the onetime heir apparent to the Murdoch media empire, almost never spoke to reporters. Still, I could only imagine the stories he had to tell.

In his 20 years working for the family business, he’d been inside rooms where decisions were made at the most powerful conservative-media empire in the world. He’d seen up close how his father’s British newspapers came to champion Brexit and how Fox News had helped deliver Donald Trump to the White House. There were signs that James had grown disillusioned with these aspects of how his family fortune had been made: In 2020, he’d abruptly resigned from News Corp’s board of directors with a cryptic letter citing “disagreements over certain editorial content.” Might he finally be willing to elaborate? Sometimes, as a reporter, all you can do is ask. What I didn’t know when we sat down for our first meeting was that the Murdochs were secretly fracturing. Rupert had decided, at age 94, to rewrite the irrevocable family trust to give sole control of the empire to his eldest son, Lachlan, rather than splitting it equally among his four oldest children as planned. A bitter (and not-yet-public) legal battle had commenced. James—liberated by what he saw as his father’s betrayal—decided, somewhat to my surprise, that he was ready to talk. The conversation that started that day ended up lasting a year. I met more than a dozen times with James and his wife, Kathryn, as they told me stories that would shock even the most devoted viewer of HBO’s Succession. These interviews were wide-ranging, filled with revelations that help explain how America got to this fraught political moment. But the stories that stayed with me most were the intensely personal ones about the unraveling of a family.