I. “Leave Him Alone”

In the morning of July 6, James and Lachlan Murdoch were on opposite sides of Sun Valley, Idaho. Lachlan was finishing a workout at the decidedly downtown Ketchum YMCA. James was hiking down a bike trail after attending an early-morning session at the annual Allen & Co. conference. Every July, the conference jams the small Friedman Memorial Airport with the Gulfstream jets of the world’s media and technology billionaires, who gather in the ski town to negotiate their own preservation. James and Lachlan had both attended the conference before, but they were always in the shadow of their father, Rupert Murdoch. This year was different. For the first time, they were there on their own terms, at least for the moment, and it might have felt as if they were finally operating by their own rules.

At a little after 10 A.M., Mountain time, Lachlan pulled out his cell phone and dialed Julie Henderson, the executive vice president and chief communications officer at 21st Century Fox, the Murdoch family company, to check in. “Have you seen the suit?” she asked. “What suit?” he replied. Henderson explained that Gretchen Carlson, a former co-host of Fox & Friends, had sued Roger Ailes personally for sexual harassment.

Lachlan dialed James, who had been named C.E.O. of 21st Century Fox a little more than a year earlier. Lachlan, the older of the two, had contented himself with the role of executive co-chairman of Fox and co-chairman of its sister company, News Corp. “Have you seen the lawsuit against Roger?,” Lachlan asked. James had not. The brothers had been rivals much of their lives, vying for the attention and good opinion of their father, the founder and executive chairman of both companies. The relationship between Rupert, who is now 85, and his sons could be complicated. It could also be oddly corporate. It took a meal at the Allen conference in July 2013 for the three men to get together and hammer out how they would all share power at the top of the Murdoch companies. Rupert always did what he thought made sense for the business, and the sons sometimes ended up as collateral damage. Lachlan, for instance, had left for Australia in 2005 after Rupert sided with Ailes over his son in a Fox Television dispute. Rupert had always been protective of the boys, but it was not always clear that they were his top priority.

Now, unexpectedly, the sons were facing a test together: one of their father’s closest deputies was being accused of a very serious offense. The brothers had a long and fractious relationship with this man. James’s wife, Kathryn Murdoch, found Ailes particularly distasteful. When their promotions had been announced, in 2015, Ailes had publicly said that he would continue reporting directly to Rupert, only to be brought up short: he would, in fact, have to report to Rupert’s sons. And at this moment, in July, as a crisis arose, Rupert himself was unavailable: he was in the air, on his way back from France, where he had been spending time on his boat in the Mediterranean with his fourth wife, Jerry Hall. What came next proved easier to accomplish because Rupert Murdoch was not immediately there to weigh in.

James and Lachlan agreed to meet back at the Sun Valley Resort, just north of Dollar Mountain, where they were staying, courtesy of Allen & Co. Julie Henderson forwarded the lawsuit to them and to Gerson Zweifach, the general counsel of 21st Century Fox, who was at his desk in New York. By Murdoch standards, Zweifach was a new hire. He had joined the company in 2012, lured away from Williams & Connolly as Murdoch desperately sought help in containing the phone-hacking scandal in Britain, which was enveloping his newspapers there. The group arranged a conference call. Zweifach then contacted Fox News to ask about the circumstances of Carlson’s departure. He didn’t know Carlson or many of the other personalities at Fox News, which operated with great autonomy within the broader media conglomerate. Part of the reason for that was the nature of Murdoch’s laissez-faire approach to management, but part of it was also the nature of Roger Ailes, who fiercely guarded his business and his control over it. “Leave him alone,” Rupert used to say about Ailes, according to a former top executive. “He knows what he’s doing.”