Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, by email, telling her “we have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do”, according to a report on the 92-year-old billionaire.
Hall was apparently waiting to meet her husband at their Oxfordshire mansion in June 2022 when she received the unexpected correspondence.
“Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage,” Murdoch’s email allegedly began. “We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do … My New York lawyer will be contacting yours immediately.”
Gabriel Sherman, a journalist who has spent decades writing about the Murdoch business, said he had seen a copy of the email sent to Hall, 66, and detailed its contents in an article for Vanity Fair.
The couple were divorced within months and publicly insisted they remained good friends. However, friends of Hall who were quoted in the article suggested that in reality she was left “devastated, mad and humiliated” after caring for Murdoch through a series of health scares and isolating with him throughout Covid.
“On the first day of Lent in February, Hall told friends she made an effigy of Murdoch, tied dental floss around its neck, and burned it on the grill,” the article claims.
According to Sherman, the couple’s divorce settlement has a clause banning Hall from providing plot suggestions to the writers of the TV show Succession, which is heavily influenced by the Murdoch family’s internal dynamics. He also reported suggestions that Murdoch’s son Lachlan believed his brother James could have been in touch with the programme’s creators.
Just like Logan Roy in the fictional TV series, Murdoch’s four children from his first two marriages are jostling over who will inherit the business when he dies. While Lachlan is already heavily involved in the family company, he faces a potential challenge from siblings James, Elisabeth and Prudence, who have either extracted themselves from the company or are only minimally involved.
The Vanity Fair article goes into detail on Murdoch’s ailing health, suggesting Hall had to nurse him extensively after he broke his back in a fall on a yacht in January 2018, leaving him close to death.
According to the article, the billionaire was evacuated from the yacht on to the French territory of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, only to discover there was no hospital open. “Murdoch had to spend the night on a gurney under a tent in the parking lot” until a special medical team could be flown in.
It is also claimed that when doctors examined an X-ray of Murdoch’s back they asked him about a number of previously broken vertebrae, which Murdoch suggested dated from an occasion when his third wife, Wendi Deng, “pushed him into a piano during a fight”.
Murdoch is facing a challenging time in his business as well as his personal life.
In 2019 he sold the majority of his entertainment businesses – including Sky in the UK and 21st Century Fox in the US – to rival media companies. He retained a slimmed-down collection of companies, including the US-based Fox network, the book publisher HarperCollins, and a series of newspapers including the Times, the Sun and the Wall Street Journal. However, attempts to reunite the empire – split to contain the fallout from the News of the World phone-hacking scandal – were abandoned earlier this year.
The business causing Murdoch the most trouble is Fox News, which is facing a $1.6bn (£1.3bn) defamation lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion, after the news channel pushed Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 US presidential election had been stolen. Jury selection for that trial is due to begin on Thursday, following months of disclosure of internal correspondence about the workings of Fox News.
Ongoing phone-hacking cases in the UK, including claims from Prince Harry that illegal activity took place at the Sun under Rebekah Brooks, are also continuing to rack up enormous financial and reputational penalties for the company.
In his personal life, Murdoch recently announced he had broken off his engagement to the conservative radio host Ann Lesley Smith, just two weeks after he had used his own New York Post tabloid to announce the engagement.
In late March, Murdoch said the couple were “looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together” after buying his future bride a $2m engagement ring. By early April the engagement was over, with Murdoch allegedly uncomfortable with her evangelical religious views.
