NEW YORK. Rupert Murdoch breaks the engagement a few months before his long-awaited fifth marriage. The brings it back Guardian quoting Vanity Fair. The 92-year-old tycoon announced his engagement just a month ago Ann Lesley Smith after a succession of stolen photos and indiscretions.
In January, the two had been immortalized in Barbados, with Murdoch bare-chested. In February the rumors of the purchase of a house in New York for 30 million dollars, and a few weeks after the official announcement of her engagement to the tycoon who asked Lesley Smith to marry him on St. Patrick’s Day. Murdoch would have broken the relationship due, according to rumors, to the too evangelical opinions and points of view of the woman.
The tycoon met his new flame last year at an event at one of his properties, Moraga Vineyard, in Bel Air, California. She has had a busy life. A dental hygienist in the 1970s, she married her first husband at the age of 28, John, an established lawyer almost twenty years her senior. After her early days, spent in her comfort and luxury, she discovered that he was an alcoholic capable of mistreating and abusing her “physically, mentally, emotionally,” he said.
The divorce left her homeless and jobless. He saved her, she says, her religion: he became a volunteer chaplain of the San Francisco police. Then she married Chester Smith, country singer, radio and television executive, who died of a heart attack, aged 78, in 2008. Now a new chapter opens for her alongside Rupert. They will live between the United States and Great Britain.
Rupert Murdoch, 92, marries for fifth time: ‘This is the last’
Murdoch has six children from his first three marriages. He was first married to Patricia Booker, an Australian stewardess, whom he divorced in the late 1960s. He and his second wife, Anne, a journalist, were together more than 30 years but divorced in 1999. His third marriage to Wendi Deng ended in 2013. Then there was a union with Jerry Hall, ex of Mick Jagger. The tycoon divorced her in 2022 after six years together due to “incompatibility of character”, leaving her “devastated by pain”.