The high-profile legal saga of disgraced South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh has entered a new chapter, days after the state’s Supreme Court threw out his 2023 convictions for the murders of his wife Maggie and son Paul. On Wednesday, Murdaugh filed a civil lawsuit against Colleton County Clerk of Court Rebecca Hill, the court official at the center of the judicial misconduct that invalidated his original guilty verdict.
Last week, the South Carolina Supreme Court issued a unanimous 5-0 ruling ordering a new trial for Murdaugh, concluding that Hill had deliberately undermined his constitutional right to a fair trial by an impartial jury. The high court documented multiple inappropriate interactions between Hill and seated jurors during the six-week 2023 trial, including statements where she urged jurors not to be swayed by evidence presented by the defense.
Within months of the guilty verdict, Hill released a commercially published tell-all book about the high-profile proceedings, which drew international media attention and drew crowds of true crime observers to the televised trial. In his new civil filing, Murdaugh’s legal team argues that Hill’s improper jury interference was driven entirely by personal financial gain. Court documents allege Hill sought a guilty verdict specifically to boost book sales, with the end goal of purchasing a lake house. The suit quotes the Supreme Court’s own finding that Hill believed a conviction would maximize profits from her planned publication.
Murdaugh is seeking monetary damages to cover the hundreds of thousands of dollars he spent on his criminal defense during the first trial, totaling $600,000 in claimed compensation for the harms he suffered as a result of Hill’s actions. This is not Hill’s first run-in with legal consequences: Last December, she pleaded guilty to multiple felony charges including misconduct in public office, obstruction of justice, and perjury connected to unrelated allegations that she misappropriated public funds during her tenure as clerk and leaked sealed court records to a journalist.
Murdaugh, once a prominent member of a powerful local legal family, has maintained his complete innocence in the 2021 killings of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. Prosecutors have announced plans to retry the double murder case, though no new trial date has been scheduled. He is currently serving consecutive 27-year and 40-year sentences for separate state and federal convictions for financial crimes, including years of stealing millions of dollars from his law firm and clients to fund an opioid addiction and extravagant lifestyle. Prosecutors argued at the original trial that the killings were an attempt to cover up this years-long pattern of financial corruption. The case has drawn global public interest, spawning multiple documentaries, podcasts, and book deals long before Hill entered the publishing space.