Rupert Murdoch will marry for the fifth time at 92: “I knew it would be my last” | Rupert Murdoch

Billionaire mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose conservative media empire spans the globe, is engaged for the fifth time at the age of 92, he told an interviewer in his own tabloid, the New York Post.

“I was very nervous. I was dreading falling in love – but I knew it would be my last. It better be. I’m happy,” Murdoch said of his new fiancée, Ann Lesley Smith, 66, whose the late husband was Chester Smith, a country singer as well as a radio and television executive.

The couple plan to marry this summer. “We’re both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together,” Murdoch said.

The summer wedding will mark the fifth time the media titan – whose business empire includes the current Fox News scandal in the US and the powerful right-wing tabloid The Sun in the UK – has married.

Murdoch has six children from his first three marriages. Prudence MacLeod, with his first wife Patricia Booker, then Elisabeth and her sons Lachlan and James with his second wife Anna Mann. He has two other daughters – Grace and Chloe – with his third wife Wendi Deng. Murdoch’s fourth wife was former model Jerry Hall, whom he split from last year.

Smith told the New York Post, “I have been a widow for 14 years. Like Rupert, my husband was a businessman. Worked for local newspapers, developed radio and television stations, and helped promote Univision. So I speak Rupert’s language. We share the same beliefs.

“For both of us, it’s a gift from God,” Smith added.

The couple will split their time between California, Britain, Montana and New York, the newspaper reported.

Murdoch met his fiancée in September 2022 at a 200-person event held at his Moraga vineyard in Bel Air, California.

In an interview with Modesto Bee in 2017, Smith described how she had been a model, songwriter and recording artist and radio personality and journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She was married twice, first to the Huntington railroad family in San Francisco, the outlet reported, and then to Chester Smith, who founded Spanish television giant Univision. The couple met while she was working as a prison chaplain.

“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, rich and then poor,” she said.

On her radio show Ann Lesley Live, she said, she liked to talk about the things she had been through. “I’m not ivory… A lot of people haven’t been through a lot, and they pontificate about things they’ve read in a book.”

The announcement comes a day before a hearing in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News that claims certain Fox News hosts and commentators endorsed a false narrative that the 2020 election were stolen. A trial is due to begin April 17 in Delaware.

In a deposition, Murdoch, chairman of Fox News’ parent company Fox Corp, said the newscast’s on-air hosts Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity approved of the idea. a stolen election to varying degrees. But he denied that Fox News itself endorsed the story.

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Messages between Fox News stars, including Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, appear to show that many within Fox News did not believe Donald Trump’s voter fraud allegations.

Some media commentators say Fox News’ corporate bosses have become beholden to hosts who broadcast allegations of voter fraud for fear of losing viewership to other right-wing networks.