Your “love is dead” of the day: News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch and his third wife, Wendi Deng, are splitting, Deadline Hollywood reports (confirmed here). The 82-year-old Murdoch reportedly filed for divorce this morning in New York State Supreme Court, less than two weeks shy of the couple’s fourteenth anniversary. Deng, 38 years Murdoch’s junior, married the mogul days after his second divorce was finalized and is the mother of his two young daughters, Grace and Chloe.
Murdoch, who’s also in the midst of a corporate split and repositioning, was said to trust his young wife’s business sense, and although she had “no official role,” she had risen “to a place of prominence in the family business,” The Wall Street Journal reported (before Murdoch owned it) in 2000, a year after the two married. (The article also features the story of Deng’s first marrige, at the age of 21, to Jack Cherry, the 53-year-old man who sponsored her student visa after the two had an affair.)
But more recently, a fissure may have grown between the media power couple: “In recent months, the Murdochs have grown to live largely separate lives,” the Times reported last summer. “With Mrs. Murdoch taking the girls to piano lessons and attending red-carpet galas, and Mr. Murdoch dealing with the scandal unfolding in Britain.”
Whatever happens, we’ll always have this, perhaps the truest expression of love ever to occur at a parliamentary hearing about phone hacking:
