Rupert Murdoch dumped Jerry Hall by email but she is ‘devastated and still loves him’
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch told model Jerry Hall their six- year marriage was over in an email, according to reports.
Hall, 66, is said by friends to be heartbroken and still in love with Murdoch, 91, whose News Corporation e m p i re c o n t r o l s ma j o r outlets including Fox News and the Wall St re e t Jo u r n a l in the US, and The Sun and The Times in the UK.
Hall has filed for divorce in the US state of California with the petition citing irreconcilable differences between the pair. She is seeking spousal support and information about the extent of Murdoch’s assets. He has an estimated fortune of £14 billion.
Hall, who has four children with Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, was waiting in the UK for Murdoch to join her when he sent an email saying the marriage was over and she should communicate with him only via his lawyers. It was reported Hall told a friend: “I still love him. I am devastated.”
Issues started to arise between them during the pandemic, according to sources close to Hall, after she apparently assumed a gate- keeping role to protect her elderly husband from the risk of Covid, which she now believes led his family to think she was seeking to cut their contact with him.
“She used to joke that she was the Covid police, she wanted to keep him safe,” sources told the Daily Mail. “They thought that Jerry was keeping them from him.”
Last year, Hall was seen “doting on” her partner at his 90th birthday party, according to the New York Times. The legal filing in the US court states: “Petitioner is unaware of the full nature and extent of all separate property assets and debts, and will amend this petition when the information has been ascertained.”
The paperwork, filed by Hall’s attorney, Ronald F Brot, lists the couple’s wedding date as March 4, 2016. However, the date of their separation is yet to be decided.
Hall and Murdoch began their relationship in 2015 and, after marrying the following year, the billionaire announced on Twitter he was “the luckiest and happiest man in world”. He has bought several homes for Hall, including a 340,000acre ranch in Montana for £ 228 million, an £ 11m house near Henley, where Hall is currently staying, and a manor house in the Cotswolds which they were planning to renovate. Murdoch already had a vineyard and winery in Los Angeles, a farm in Australia, an apartment in Mayfair and another apartment in New York. Mu r d o c h has already been divorced three times. He divorced his first wife, Patricia Booker, an Australian model, in 1967. His second marriage to former newspaper reporter Anna Mann lasted three decades until they split in 1999, in a divorce reportedly costing him £1.5bn. Murdoch divorced his third wife, media executive Wendi Deng, in 2013. The New York Times reported in June that Murdoch’s latest divorce would be unlikely to alter the ownership structure of businesses he holds stakes in. The tycoon has six children – Prudence from his first marriage, James, Lachlan, and Elisabeth from his second, and Chloe and Grace from his third. In 2018, his elder son Lachlan was named as his successor as chief executive of Fox Corp. Murdoch also sold most of 21st Century Fox to the Walt Disney Company. Lachlan returned to the family business in 2014, after an abrupt departure nearly a decade earlier.