Icy e-mail to Jerry Hall. Brutal blow when instructed about Tony Blair and Wendi. And the Bible studying that was the tip: How Rupert Murdoch dispatches his girls as ruthlessly as he does his enterprise rivals, revealed in new ebook

Rupert Murdoch was 84 when he fell in love with the supermodel Jerry Hall. It was an unlikely pairing: he a conservative media mogul who lived for the next business deal, she a liberal fashion icon and actress 25 years his ­junior, whose former long-term partner was rock star Mick Jagger. Yet it worked.

They met in September 2013, when Jerry was in Melbourne playing Mrs Robinson in the stage version of The Graduate.

After months of emails and phone calls between them, Jerry finally agreed to a lunch date in New York where, arriving at her Manhattan hotel, she was charmed to find he’d had her room filled with flowers and chocolates.

A couple of nights later, Rupert took her to see Hamilton on Broadway. ‘He was an old-fashioned gentleman. We laughed together non-stop,’ she told friends. ‘They seemed to our surprise very happy and a wonderful fit,’ recalled her friend Tom Cashin. Six months later, Rupert proposed, telling her: ‘Mick was so unfaithful to you, I’d never be unfaithful,’ according to someone briefed on the conversation. They married in March 2016, a week before Rupert’s 85th birthday, with a service at London’s historic journalists’ church St. Bride’s. ‘No more tweets for ten days or ever! Feel like the luckiest AND happiest man in world,’ Rupert posted. During the Covid lockdown four years later, he and Jerry quarantined in his 13-acre Bel Air estate without staff for months.

Jerry bought robot vacuums to clean the floors, baked sourdough bread and cooked simple meals of roast chicken, leg of lamb and vegetarian pasta.

During the day, Rupert watched the stock market and took Zoom calls while Jerry took online courses in UC Davis’s winemaking programme. (Jerry told friends Rupert wanted her to do it so he could write off $3million of vineyard expenses as long as she worked 500 hours a year on winemaking.)

At night, they played chess, backgammon, gin rummy and other card games. She usually won, she told friends, except when they played liar’s dice. ‘He’s a good liar!’ she told them.

Less than two years later, everything changed. On the afternoon of June 6, 2022, Jerry was at her London house nursing a terrible case of food poisoning when she checked her phone.

‘Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage,’ Rupert’s email began. ‘We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do… my New York ­lawyer will be contacting yours immediately.’

She was left reeling. ‘Rupert and I never fought,’ she told friends, while admitting there had been friction with his adult children over her rules about masking and testing before they saw Rupert.

Her relationship with his daughters was particularly fraught. Elisabeth didn’t like that Jerry kept Rupert up past his usual bedtime; and during lockdown, Jerry had asked Elisabeth and Prue to look at country houses for her and Rupert to purchase near London, but instead the daughters bought the properties for themselves.

She had also clashed with then 20-year-old Grace – one of Rupert’s two daughters with his previous wife, Wendi Deng.

Jerry had been upset when, in the summer of 2021, Grace organised a father-daughter lunch in Bel Air with Elisabeth and Prue and excluded her. ‘I was in the kitchen cooking but not allowed to join them outside on the veranda,’ Jerry later texted a friend. Then in the spring of 2022, she was furious when Rupert asked her to leave their $200 million Montana ranch because Grace’s therapist called and said Grace was flying in and didn’t want her around.

Jerry thought Grace was trying to manipulate Rupert. ‘Grace wanted to get me out of Montana because she was trying to get Rupert to hire a famous DJ to play at her 21st birthday party at Yale who cost $1.6million and she thought I would say it was too expensive,’ she texted a friend.

Jerry departed for LA on Rupert’s private plane, from where she sent him an angry email about having to leave the Montana ranch.

She never dreamt his answer would be to divorce her by email.

That week in London, she tried desperately to salvage their relationship. ‘I thought we were very much in love and happy,’ she emailed him.

But Rupert had already moved on, as he’d done many times before. ‘At this stage, we must leave it to the lawyers to do their best for us individually,’ he responded coldly.

‘I am so sad,’ she emailed him on June 10. ‘Thank you for making me feel happy and secure for seven years. I will always love you.’

Their divorce was finalised in August 2022. One part of the settlement was that Jerry couldn’t give story ideas to the writers on Succession, the HBO series inspired by the Murdochs.

She told friends that Rupert made her move everything out of the Bel Air estate within 30 days and show receipts to prove items belonged to her. Security guards watched as her children helped her pack.

When she settled into the Oxfordshire home she received in the divorce, she discovered 32 ­surveillance cameras were still sending footage back to the headquarters of Murdoch’s TV behemoth Fox. Jagger sent his security consultant to disconnect them.

Four months later, Jerry got what she felt was a potential clue as to why Rupert broke off the marriage. Newspapers around the world printed photos of him on holiday in Barbados with new ­girlfriend Ann Lesley Smith.

She was a 66-year-old former dental hygienist turned conservative radio host with conspiracy-style politics, who had found God after her first marriage ended in divorce.

Jerry remembered she and Rupert had hosted Ann Lesley for dinner at the Carmel Ranch about a year earlier. At the time, Ann Lesley was dating the ranch manager.

Jerry didn’t think anything of it when Ann Lesley gushed to Rupert that he and Fox News were saving democracy. Or when she offered to give him a teeth cleaning. Or when he began making trips alone to Carmel, which he explained was because Grace wanted alone time with him there.

Looking back, Jerry told friends that Rupert had simply moved on, the way he had ended previous marriages. ‘When Rupert is done with people that’s it! They’re gone!’ she texted a friend. ‘She was devastated, mad and humiliated,’ her friend Cashin said. On the first day of Lent in February 2023, Jerry told friends she made an effigy of Murdoch, tied dental floss around its neck and burned it on the grill.

On March 17, 2023, Rupert proposed to Ann Lesley with an 11-carat diamond engagement ring said to be worth upward of $2.5 million. The wedding was planned for summer.

But he quickly became uncomfortable with her extreme evangelical views. The final straw came at a dinner at his Bel Air home at which the Fox News political commentator Tucker Carlson was a guest. During the meal, Ann ­Lesley pulled out a Bible and started reading passages from the book of Exodus, telling Carlson she thought he was a messenger from God. According to one who was there: ‘Rupert just sat there and stared.’

A few days later, he called off the wedding.

Barely five months later, the now 92-year-old Rupert had a new girlfriend: 66-year-old retired Russian biologist Elena Zhukova, whom he would soon go on to make his fifth wife.

When it came to divorcing without warning, Rupert certainly had form. In 1967 he’d divorced his first wife Patricia, mother of their daughter Prudence, so he could marry Anna Torv, whom he’d met in 1962 when she was a 19-year-old reporter on one of his Australian newspapers.

His marriage to Anna lasted for more than 30 years, through the unrelenting expansion of the ­Murdoch empire, before coming to its abrupt end.

Anna, mother of Rupert’s children Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, was becoming increasingly exhausted by Rupert’s perpetual moves across the globe. In late 1993, he convinced her to relocate from LA to Hong Kong, while he focused on his expansion aims in China.

They moved during winter when the city was blanketed in fog. Anna hated the gloom and returned to LA after six weeks. Rupert then complained he missed New York and wanted to move back east. ‘You’re a perpetual motion machine,’ Anna snapped. ‘I’ve had enough of keeping pace with you. I’m staying in LA.’

She had traipsed around the globe as he built his empire, endured his absences and emotional unavailability, all while ­raising three children and a stepdaughter. Now she wanted Rupert to make her the priority. He was in his mid-60s and she wanted him to retire and slow down.

Her talk of his retirement depressed him. ‘I’d probably die,’ he said to a friend. Instead he made her a counterproposal. ‘Let’s divorce.’

Anna was taken totally by ­surprise. Rupert then announced – in the pages of his own New York Post, no less – that he and Anna were separating after 31 years of marriage. The Post announcement described the split as ‘amicable’. It was anything but. ‘This is war, make no mistake about it,’ one News Corp executive said.

In June 1998, Anna filed for divorce in California, a state with communal property laws that entitled her to half of Rupert’s

$8billion fortune. Rupert went on the offensive. He was, in Anna’s later telling, ‘extremely hard, ruthless and determined’.

In September that year, Rupert announced he would sell the ­Beverly Hills home that Anna loved. The next month, he booted her off News Corp’s board. Anna insisted on formally resigning in person. Lachlan escorted her out of the meeting in tears.

A divorce deal was hammered out, one that required Anna to sacrifice money to secure the ­children’s future.

Rupert would pay her $100million, instead of the $2billion she originally sought. In exchange, Rupert amended the family trust so that the empire would be divided equally between Prue, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James.

Each child received one vote. After Rupert died, control would fall to the children. Crucially, any subsequent children Rupert had would get no votes.

‘We have something that cannot be touched,’ Anna later told a journalist.

But she had not reckoned with Wendi Deng. Rupert had first met and fallen for Wendi in 1997, two years before the divorce from Anna, when he was addressing Star TV employees in Hong Kong at the inauguration of the company’s new headquarters.

After he spoke, a tall, stylishly-dressed young Chinese woman with pixie hair raised her hand. ‘Why is your business strategy in China so bad?’ she said in accented English.

Her insubordination sucked the air out of the room. Was she trying to get fired on the spot? No one talked back like that to Rupert. He answered her, showing his ­irritation. ‘Does that satisfy you?’ he asked. ‘No,’ she said.

He was intrigued. Afterwards, she introduced herself as Wendi Deng, a Yale MBA student.

Two years later, after a whirlwind courtship that included the couple being spotted in a hotel gym together at 6am, sweating away on exercise bikes and giggling like teenagers, she would be Wendi Deng Murdoch.

On June 25 1999 they married on the deck of Murdoch’s yacht Morning Glory in front of 80 guests, as it circled Manhattan.

With Wendi’s encouragement, Rupert bought Laurance ­Rockefeller’s Fifth Avenue triplex for $44 million – at the time, the most expensive purchase in New York history.

Then, a humiliating profile of her was published in the Wall Street Journal, chronicling her tempestuous journey out of China and her affair with an American father who supported her student visa. She retreated, to focus on her new role as mother to her and Rupert’s baby daughters Grace and Chloe, born in 2001 and 2003.

According to a former nanny, the Murdochs employed a pair of secretaries, a chef, two housekeepers, a tutor and a part-time laundry person.

But Wendi insisted she did much of the work herself. ‘I quit work to work at home. To care for Rupert, slaving, don’t get paid. Construction, chef and cooking and house cleaning!’ she told a journalist.

Having paused her media career, she poured her ambitions into her children’s future and securing their place in the Rupert dynasty.

In the autumn of 2004, Rupert approached his adult children with an indelicate request: he wanted to include Chloe and Grace in the trust.

It was more than just estate planning – it was Wendi’s attempt to rewrite Anna’s legacy. The divorce settlement that had secured the four older children’s inheritance was now under assault by the new wife and her daughters. Elisabeth, Lachlan, James and Prue rejected the offer.

As Lachlan saw it, Anna sacrificed half of what Rupert owed her – billions – to ensure that Lachlan and his siblings would control the company after Rupert died.

Wendi refused to relent. Christmas 2004 was a write-off. She and Rupert ‘were fighting all night over the estate for the kids’. the nanny recalled. Wendi continued to demand that Grace and Chloe, then aged four and three, be treated as full heirs with equal voting rights in the trust.

After months of acrimony, Rupert broke the stalemate with money: he gave each of his children $150million in cash and declared that Chloe and Grace would be financial equals.

Then, in July 2006, he blindsided Wendi on national television, when he unilaterally announced on the Charlie Rose programme that Grace and Chloe would not get voting rights in the trust.

Wendi called his mobile phone, screaming about his announcement, according to a News Corp executive who overheard the conversation.

Coincidentally, the talk show host Charlie Rose was scheduled to moderate a panel at a News Corp retreat in California a few days later. Wendi demanded that Rupert uninvite him.

In a detail that would become a company legend, Rupert told executives that when he arrived at their Carmel ranch, Wendi made him sleep in the garage.

On the surface, they continued to present themselves as a strong couple. Famously in 2011, during the phone hacking inquiry inside the Houses of Parliament, Wendi slapped a protester who had shoved a shaving cream pie in Rupert’s face: a fierce wife defending her husband’s honour.

But by that point, they were essentially living separate lives. A former employee recalled that they slept separately at their Fifth Avenue triplex.

At home, they fought constantly. ‘It would start with how he was dressed. Or the schedule for the kids. Or something the nanny said,’ recalled a friend. ‘Just anything would set her off.’

The verbal brawls allegedly turned physical. According to what Rupert later told doctors, in early 2011 Wendi shoved him into the piano in their New York home. He broke vertebrae and required hospitalisation.

It was her alleged extramarital affairs that really put paid to the marriage. In late 2012, Lachlan told his father that the butler at his New York penthouse had found a crumpled note in the rubbish bin, written by Wendi.

The letter was written like an angsty teenager speaking in broken English. ‘Oh sh**, oh sh**…Whatever why I’m so so missing Tony. Because he is so charming and his clothes are so good. He has such a good body and he has really really good legs Butt [sic]… And he is slim tall and good skin. Pierce blue eyes which I love. Love his eyes. Also I love his power on the stage… and what else and what else and what else…’

The Tony in question was former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had been a close friend of the couple. This allegation was particularly devastating for Rupert. His newspapers had helped to elect Blair and the two became friends ­during Blair’s ten years as Prime Minister. In 2010, Rupert made Blair godfather to Grace.

Lachlan, like many others, had heard the rumours of Wendi’s infidelities – an anonymous dossier to the American blog Gawker had alleged: ‘Wendi’s path to [Rupert’s] boardroom and bedroom [was] paved with betrayal, infidelity, adultery and continuous scandalous affairs.’

For a man who built an information empire, Rupert was, ironically, one of the last to hear the rumours – until Lachlan said: ‘Of course she’s cheating, Dad. Everyone knows that but you.’

Murdoch discreetly investigated. News Corp lawyers found emails from Wendi suggesting she’d slept with a tennis coach in Carmel, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt and with Tony Blair.

From household staff, Rupert learned that Blair and Wendi met alone and acted like lovers. A ranch staffer told Rupert they were seen feeding each other at dinner.

Feeling betrayed and humiliated, Rupert filed for divorce in New York, blindsiding Wendi.

Within a day, the Hollywood Reporter published the allegations about her Blair romance. Both Wendi and Blair denied the story and called Rupert repeatedly – but he refused to pick up.

Rupert later told people to let Blair know that he never wanted to speak to him again.

Adapted from Bonfire of the Murdochs by Gabriel Sherman (Simon & Schuster, £25).

© Gabriel Sherman 2026. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to 28/02/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.