The billionaire mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose conservative media empire spans the globe, is engaged to marry for the fifth time, he told an interviewer in his own tabloid newspaper, the New York Post.
“I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love – but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I’m happy,” Murdoch, 92, said of his new fiancee, Ann Lesley Smith, 66, whose late husband was Chester Smith, a country singer as well as radio and TV executive.
The pair intend to get married in the 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 that the media titan – whose business empire includes the currently scandal hit Fox News in the US and the powerful rightwing tabloid the Sun in the United Kingdom – has tied the knot.
Murdoch has six children from his first three marriages. Prudence MacLeod, with his first wife Patricia Booker, then Elisabeth and sons Lachlan and James with his second wife Anna Mann. He has two more daughters – Grace and Chloe – with his third wife Wendi Deng. Murdoch’s fourth wife was the former supermodel Jerry Hall, from whom he split last year.
Smith told the New York Post: “I’m a widow 14 years. Like Rupert, my husband was a businessman. Worked for local papers, developed radio and TV stations and helped promote Univision. So I speak Rupert’s language. We share the same beliefs.”
“For us both it’s a gift from God,” Smith added.
The couple will split their time between California, Britain, Montana and New York, the paper reported.
Murdoch met his fiancee in September of 2022 at a 200-person event held at his Moraga vineyard in Bel Air, California.
In an interview with the Modesto Bee in 2017, Smith described how she had been a runway model, songwriter and recording artist and San Francisco Bay Area radio personality and journalist.
She has been married twice, first into the Huntington railroad family in San Francisco, the outlet reported, and later to Chester Smith, who had founded the Spanish TV giant Univision. The pair met when 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 things she had been through. “I’m not ivory-towering it … A lot of people haven’t gone through a lot, and they pontificate on stuff they’ve read in a book.”
The announcement comes one day before a hearing in a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News that claims some Fox News hosts and commentators endorsed a false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen. A trial is scheduled to start on 17 April in Delaware.
In a deposition, Murdoch, the chair of Fox News parent Fox Corp, said the TV news outlet’s on-air hosts Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity, had endorsed the idea of a stolen election to varying degrees. But he denied that Fox News itself had endorsed the narrative.
Messages between Fox News stars, including Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, appear to show that within Fox News many did not believe Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud.
Some media commentators claim Fox News corporate chiefs became beholden to hosts spreading election fraud claims for fear of losing audience to other rightwing networks.