The good thing is she had a couple of kids by this old fool before she dumped his ass for a younger man! So he has to keep paying the bitch because of the kids! Haha! NO fool like an old fool! Hahahahahahaha! See how the Lord will punish those who attack his servants? Our honorable President Obama, God's chosen servant? God planted the the sword of iniquity within your house old boy! Is this amusing to you now like that insulting cartoon you thought was so clever and funny old boy? God said you will reap what you sow; so now you're the laughing stock of the world as your little Mrs. made an old fool out of you! Hahahahahahaha! You can't mess with God old boy! He doesn't care about all that good money HE gave your worthless butt! Hahahahahahahaha!
The 14-year marriage of Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng ended abruptly last year, after the News Corp. chairman came to believe his third wife had been romantically involved with a former head of state and with a prominent Silicon Valley executive. Talking to friends of the couple’s, Mark Seal reports on the shifting power dynamics in the Murdoch household as Deng’s ambitions changed, and tackles the question now being debated: Who blindsided whom?
The 14-year marriage of Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng ended abruptly last year, after the News Corp. chairman came to believe his third wife had been romantically involved with a former head of state and with a prominent Silicon Valley executive. Talking to friends of the couple’s, Mark Seal reports on the shifting power dynamics in the Murdoch household as Deng’s ambitions changed, and tackles the question now being debated: Who blindsided whom?
The woman was Wendi Deng Murdoch, the Chinese wife of the Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The note, not revealed until now, could have been one of the few pieces of evidence in their surprise divorce last year, had the case come to trial. "Tony" was the former prime minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair.
Rupert Murdoch is one of the wealthiest individuals in America. His empire includes newspapers around the globe, the 21st Century Fox movie studio, the Fox TV network, and the publishing house Harper-Collins. In the years between the Murdochs' marriage, in 1999, and their divorce, 14 years later, a story emerged that could have come right off the pages of one of the tabloids produced by News Corporation, Murdoch's media conglomerate, complete with all the usual lurid ingredients: sex, lies, power, money, charges of infidelity.
The dénouement began with the backstairs rumblings of servants. Murdoch, 82, had long heard rumors that his 45-year-old wife was involved in extramarital affairs. But when those rumors grew to include too familiar a relationship with Blair, according to a former News Corp. employee in the U.K., "that was something that really took him aback." After all, through the power of The Sun, and his other London newspapers, the TimesandNews of the World, Murdoch had virtually put Blair into office, and Blair had become not only a valued friend but also the godfather of Grace, the older of Rupert and Wendi's two daughters. (Through a representative, Tony Blair declined to be interviewed. After the announcement of the divorce last June, The Hollywood Reporter published a categorical denial from Blair's office.)
(Joint statement from Wendi and Rupert Murdoch: "Given the complicated dynamics of our family, we made the decision early on in this process not to engage in public allegations or respond to negative claims." Through her representative, Chris Giglio, Wendi Deng Murdoch declined to be interviewed or answer questions.)
Murdoch's cattle ranch sprawls across 1,000 acres of highlands in Carmel, California. He bought it in the early 1990s with Anna, his wife of 31 years, as a vacation respite for his family and select officers of News Corp. That was where, in the autumn of 2012 and the spring of 2013, events allegedly occurred that would lead to the end of Murdoch's marriage to his third wife.
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Murdoch's staff slowly began to keep tabs on Wendi, according to the source, whom they found to be often bad-tempered, but they were hesitant to tell their boss their suspicions of infidelity. Last summer, however, Murdoch told friends, he met with staff members individually and asked them to tell him the truth. They gave him detailed accounts of his wife's meetings with Blair.
"Mr. Blair was reluctant at first," says someone who has worked in a Murdoch family home. "They were all mutual friends; there was no reason Mr. Murdoch wouldn't have welcomed Mr. Blair into his home. But one day Mr. Blair arrived and Mrs. Murdoch was sort of being very flirtatious. She was charming him. He asked the staff, 'When is Mr. Murdoch going to arrive?' And when he was told, 'Tomorrow night,' Mr. Blair rolled his eyes and gave a panicked look."
On October 7, 2012, a Sunday, Wendi had told Rupert that she was having a girls' weekend at the ranch, according to the former News Corp. employee. She had become part of a cabal of strong, successful women, and such girls' weekends had become common in the marriage, whether on Rupert's 184-foot sailboat, Rosehearty, on his boat off St. Barth's, or at the Golden Door spa, in Escondido, California. That weekend, according to the source, Rupert's mother, Dame Elisabeth, 103, "had been sent home from the hospital, and the family was going to gather, because she was expected to die within a few days. [She died two months later.] Nonetheless, Wendi went up to the ranch."
Only one girlfriend, Kathy Freston, the self-help author and estranged wife of former Viacom C.E.O. Tom Freston (V.F.'s "Our Man in Kabul"), joined Wendi, the source continues. "The girlfriend was up there but left early . . . and Tony Blair arrived on Sunday, which is confirmed by someone who saw him at the ranch."
That same weekend, Kathy Freston attended an event where some of Rupert Murdoch's friends saw her. "The cover was sort of blown," says the source. (Asked to be interviewed, Kathy Freston responded, "I'd prefer not to be involved in this, and besides, I don't have anything interesting to say.") "Wendi then left on Monday," the source continues. "What's interesting is that her husband had been trying to reach Tony on a different subject and ended up speaking to him the next week by phone. But he didn't mention that he had seen Wendi, as you can imagine. Around this time, Blair was actively and successfully soliciting funds for his foundation from her husband."
One meeting took place at the end of April 2013. "That Thursday, Wendi arrived at the ranch for a weekend, which was supposedly to be spent alone," says the source. "And on Saturday, April 27, Blair arrived again [on a private jet, with his security detail]."
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"They flew together the following day to Los Angeles," continues the former News Corp. employee, "in time for a dinner to be co-hosted by the Murdochs in aid of Blair's foundation-that, for Murdoch, was the straw that broke the camel's back. It was such a betrayal that it led Murdoch to look at other things."
These included an alleged overnight stay by Wendi at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Eric Schmidt. "She said she was going to stay at a girlfriend's house and was going to go hiking early the next morning," says an individual who has worked with Murdoch. "She left with an overnight bag and came back the next morning in the same clothes, and the workout clothes were untouched. There was a valet tag on her car that said 'BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL AND BUNGALOWS,' and it had Eric Schmidt's name on it." (Eric Schmidt declined to comment. However, someone familiar with the parties said, "Many people know that the Beverly Hills Hotel is one of the places where Eric Schmidt regularly stays in L.A. So something connecting him to the hotel isn't proof of anything.")
These accounts, according to the source, led Murdoch to file divorce papers last June, blindsiding the woman he had met when she was working at his Star TV network, in Hong Kong. The petition states that the marriage had "broken down irretrievably." The divorce was settled in November, sparing the couple the spectacle of a trial. But questions remain: If the allegations are true, how could the powerful press lord, who supposedly knows all, sees all, and hears all, be played for such a chump? And then there is the enduring question: Who is Wendi Deng?
Top Shanghai Girl
"She wanted to be successful and a strong woman," says Li Hong over roast duck in a restaurant as she attempts to paint the Xuzhou where she and Wendi grew up. Forget about boyfriends, cars, or movies, Li Hong tells me. There wasn't even light. "The lights went off at seven P.M.," she says. Until they went on again the next morning, Wendi would study, sleep only three hours, then awaken at three or four A.M. to "read English," says Li Hong. Because English was a way out.
Wendi's father was the manager of Xuzhou's engineering factory, earning 300 yuan ($50 today) a month. "Her family was relatively better off than the rest of us," says Li Hong admiringly. "They lived in an apartment unit in a building, about 500 square feet, three bedrooms, very stingy." I had stood outside that housing complex, a clothesline-crisscrossed building just off a main thoroughfare, where Wendi lived with her parents, two older sisters, a younger brother, and an ancient auntie. Still a hovel, in Wendi's time it had no hot water. "I grew up so poor in China that one day I aspired to have meat regularly," she would later say. "She tells you about growing up in total squalor," says a friend. "She had the hand-me-downs, and the parents focused on the boy." Wendi told British Vogue, "My parents were so tough. In the summer when everyone else was on vacation I had to study the whole textbook for next year so I would be ahead in class. . . . It had to be 120 per cent."
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