Murdoch, Hall splitting up
Rupert Murdoch, the mogul who controls Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the British Sun tabloid among a host of other media properties, and former actress-supermodel Jerry Hall are divorcing after six years, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
This signals the end of Murdoch’s fourth, and shortest, marriage. The pair wed in March 2016 when Murdoch was 85 and Hall was 59, in a London ceremony that resembled a boldface blended family portrait with her children (whose father is Mick Jagger) and his (who include the nowceo of Fox Corp.) in attendance.
News of the split was first reported by The New York Times.
As emissaries of wildly disparate celebrity worlds, the pair was the subject of endless media fascination.
But Murdoch’s marriage to Hall still managed to avoid most of the tabloid friction that crackled through his previous union with Wendi Deng. Deng, a former News Corp employee who met Murdoch at a company event, famously smacked down a protester who threw a foam pie at Murdoch during a 2011 British parliamentary hearing. And it was during that 1999-2014 marriage that Murdoch broke up the terms of the trust that controls his family’s media empire in order to make space for his two daughters with Deng.
Murdoch divorced his second wife, Anna, a former newspaper reporter, in 1999 after 32 years of marriage and three children. He had one child with his first wife, Patricia Booker, to whom he was married from 1956 to 1967.
Although Murdoch sold the bulk of his empire in a $71 billion sale to Disney in 2019, he remained a formidable presence in
both media and politics through his media outlets.
Hall, a Texas native, was one of the defining top models of the 1970s before segueing into a handful of 1980s acting roles. But her two-decade relationship with Jagger ended in 1999 when she filed for divorce — and a British court agreed with Jagger’s argument that their 1990 wedding in Bali was never legally binding.