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. 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. Alex Murdaugh was convicted in Maggie and Paul’s murders in March 2023 and was sentenced to life in prison.
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.’ Warner Bros and Blackfin filed a motion to dismiss on multiple grounds, including the First Amendment, court filings show.