By most accounts the couple had grown apart and spent long stretches away from each other, but people close to the Murdochs did not expect the 82-year-old mogul to divorce his wife of 14 years. Too messy financially. It wouldn’t be good for their daughters, Grace, 11, and Chloe, 9, said these people, who would only discuss the couple’s marriage anonymously.
But on Thursday, Mr. Murdoch filed for divorce in a New York State Supreme Court. The filing said that the “relationship between husband and wife has broken down irretrievably.”
The couple was in New York at their Fifth Avenue penthouse on Thursday when news of the divorce, said to be Mr. Murdoch’s decision, emerged. A spokeswoman for News Corporation confirmed the divorce filing, which was first reported by Deadline Hollywood, and said the divorce would have no impact on the company. The Murdoch family trust controls 38.4 percent of News Corporation’s voting shares. Mrs. Murdoch has no financial stake in the company.
Ira E. Garr of the law firm Garr Silpe will represent Mr. Murdoch, and Pamela M. Sloan of Aronson Mayefsky Sloan L.L.P. will represent Mrs. Murdoch, 44, in what could prove a highly contentious divorce. Mr. Murdoch’s divorce in 1998 from his second wife, Anna, cost $1.7 billion, including $110 million in cash.
The divorce filing comes as Mr. Murdoch readies News Corporation for a split into two companies on June 28. Entertainment assets like Fox Broadcasting, Fox News and the Hollywood studio will form a company called 21st Century Fox. Publishing assets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and Harper Collins and a handful of Australian TV assets will form a company called News Corp.
Two years ago, Mrs. Murdoch’s image experienced an unexpected boost. In July 2011, as Mr. Murdoch testified in front of a British parliamentary subcommittee about a phone hacking scandal at the company’s News of the World tabloid, Mrs. Murdoch, wearing a pink blazer, instinctively lurched toward a protester to protect her husband from a pie attack.
Mrs. Murdoch’s protective urge became a viral sensation. “Nothing can characterize her more than that, protective and strong and fierce and not afraid,” the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, a friend of Mrs. Murdoch’s, said in an interview last year.
Mr. Murdoch first met Wendi Deng in 1998 on a business trip to China. A recent graduate of the Yale School of Management, Ms. Deng was working at Star TV, a unit of News Corporation with a new headquarters in Hong Kong. Mr. Murdoch hosted a town hall and fielded a tough question about his company’s China strategy from an eager and well-prepared Ms. Deng.
That same year Liz Smith announced in The New York Post that Mr. Murdoch and his wife of more than three decades, Anna, had separated. The couple had three children, Lachlan, James and Elisabeth. Mr. Murdoch divorced his first wife, Patricia, in 1967. They had one daughter, Prudence.
In 1999, Mr. Murdoch married Ms. Deng in front of 82 guests on board his 155-foot yacht, the Morning Glory, in New York Harbor. The newest Mrs. Murdoch tried to find a place for herself in the family and the family business, with varying degrees of success.
As head of Star TV, James Murdoch worked with Mrs. Murdoch to help build News Corporation’s presence in China. Mrs. Murdoch, whose friends describe her as energetic with a passion for business, slowly began to win over James’s respect, according to a person close to the Murdoch family.
In 2006, a marital battle erupted after Mr. Murdoch declared in a TV interview with Charlie Rose that while Grace and Chloe would have an economic interest in the family’s trust, they would not have the same voting rights as his four children from previous marriages. That was the first time Mrs. Murdoch had heard about the arrangement.
Mr. Murdoch’s six children have equal shares in the company through a family trust, but only Prudence, Lachlan, James and Elisabeth have the right to appoint trustees for the trust, which will give them control over the company when Mr. Murdoch dies.
Several people close to the Murdochs pointed to the battle over Grace’s and Chloe’s inheritance as a sign that future battles could ensue over how Mr. Murdoch’s net worth — $11.2 billion, according to Forbes — is divided.
“That led to an extremely difficult weekend at the Murdoch household,” one person close to the family who was not authorized to publicly discuss their relationship said of that fight. “That had the potential for a breakup at that point,” this person added.
Born in humble circumstances as Deng Wen Ge in Jiangsu Province in eastern China, Mrs. Murdoch has recently taken on a wider range of professional endeavors, including producing the movie “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.” The movie was released by News Corporation’s Fox Searchlight division in July 2011. But its release was soon eclipsed when news surfaced that Mr. Murdoch’s British tabloid News of the World had hacked into the voice mail of Milly Dowler, a missing teenager who, it turned out, had been killed.
As the scandal in Britain has somewhat subsided, Mr. Murdoch has readied for the split of his company with what confidants describe as giddy anticipation and the chance to build up his newspaper empire.
“I have been given an extraordinary opportunity most people never get in their lifetime: the chance to do it all over again,” Mr. Murdoch said in a May 28 investor meeting for the new News Corporation.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/business/media/rupert-murdoch-files-for-divorce-after-14-years-of-marriage.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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