Alex Murdaugh’s surviving son filed a defamation lawsuit Monday against Netflix and others who produced documentaries and news articles that insinuated he was involved in the 2015 murder of his classmate—a legal maneuver one lawyer involved told The Daily Beast is sure to “backfire.”
The lawsuit comes more than a year after Alex Murdaugh was convicted of murdering his wife and son in a dizzying trial that garnered international attention.
Since that conviction, Buster Murdaugh, 30, has himself been at the center of a separate murder mystery involving the killing of his 19-year-old former classmate, Stephen Smith, in 2015.
Now, a lawyer for Smith’s family thinks Buster’s defamation lawsuit will do little more than ensure the steady flow of documentaries continues while potentially forcing him to reveal what his relationship—if there was one at all—was to Smith.
“I think the defendants will love this lawsuit because it will make a part 3 of any documentary,” the attorney Eric Bland told The Daily Beast. “Buster was never asked if he had any knowledge of [Smith’s] death. He just said he didn’t kill [Smith] and didn’t have sexual relationship with him.”
Buster casted away any involvement in Smith’s death in March, claiming he was merely the victim of “vicious rumors.”
Still, those rumors were featured prominently in a number of documentaries, which recounted the fall of his once-prominent, now-infamous South Carolina family.
Smith was found dead in 2015 on a backcountry road in Hampton, South Carolina, not far from the Murdaugh hunting estate—where patriarch Alex Murdaugh fatally shot his wife and son in 2021. A medical examiner concluded that Smith died from a hit-and-run accident.
The teen’s death has gone unsolved for nearly a decade, with his family demanding answers from local cops who initially wrote it off as merely a tragic hit-and-run crash. In June 2021, however, state authorities announced they’d opened a new probe into the death “based upon information gathered during the course of the double-murder investigation of Paul and Maggie Murdaugh.”
The case received another major update last spring, when South Carolina state police saying Smith died as the result of an “intentional killing.” With Smith and Buster having been high school classmates, and the proximity of the incident to the Murdaugh hunting estate, many have viewed Buster as a potential suspect.
Bland has been a prominent lawyer in the Murdaugh saga since 2021. He first represented victims to Murdaugh’s many fraud scheme, and later took on the Smith family as a client as police re-diverted attention to the case.
Now, Bland says he believes Buster’s lawsuit has opened him up to revealing potentially-damning information during discovery—assuming the lawsuit isn’t dropped.
“I think this lawsuit will backfire,” he said. “I talked to a number of attorneys who were asked to take on his lawsuit and they passed. This will only bring a spotlight to Stephen’s investigation.”
Bland added that Murdaugh is “exposing himself” and that the discovery process will help show how well he knew Stephen.
“I am very interested into the discovery of this,” Bland added.
Buster’s lawsuit says he’s seeking damages from Netflix and other media outlets, including the editor of the local newspaper, The Hampton County Guardian, for their coverage of the saga.
This post was originally published on Daily Beast
