Murdoch’s change of heart: Was marriage called off over a religious or succession issue?

Rupert Murdoch’s summer wedding to Ann Lesley Smith was called off last week, barely two weeks after it had been was announced, upon the arrival of spring, in the pages of the New York Post. “We’re both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together,” Murdoch, 92, said of the union, three days after he’d put a $2m Asscher-cut diamond solitaire engagement ring on Smith’s wedding finger during St Patrick’s Day festivities in New York.

Smith, 66, a former San Francisco police chaplain whose late husband was the country singer Chester Smith (who also founded the Spanish language media giant Univision), told the Post that the union “a gift from God”.

But scarcely two weeks later, Vanity Fair revealed a source close to the media titan told the publication the billionaire had become “increasingly uncomfortable” with Smith’s “outspoken evangelical views” and the wedding was off. A spokesman for Murdoch acknowledged to the New York Times that it would not be a “great leap” to say that the relationship was over.

Smith had raised some eyebrows with how strongly she expressed her religious views at a party in Barbados that she and Murdoch attended over Christmas, a source familiar with the Murdoch social scene told the Guardian.

Smith, who had also once been married to Michael Carabello, percussionist in the acid psychedelic rock band Santana, has spoken publicly in the past about the powerful way that religion changed her life. “The Lord gave me thirst and a hunger for Him, and I actually replaced the things of the world with the Scriptures,” she told the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2013. “As I began to walk with God, the things of the world just seemed pointless to me.”

The would-be Murdoch bride may also have been uncomfortable with the recent media attention – including reports of a dispute Smith had with three stepchildren from a previous marriage over a trust. A court found it “lost all confidence in her ability to administer the trust other than for her own benefit”. The dispute was settled in 2010, and Smith admitted no wrongdoing.

But does this fully explain the abrupt change of direction for the couple? Murdoch watchers, often barely divisible from fans of the fictionalized, high-end HBO drama Succession, speculated that the cold feet may also have been influenced to some extent by the heirs – James, Elisabeth, Lachlan and Prudence – with votes in the trust that will some day determine who runs the company. “Whenever you have a patriarch, a family legacy and money, there’s going to be a power struggle. It’s surprising how much the children are in thrall to him and how much they don’t want to share him,” said one person familiar with the family dynamics.

Murdoch’s fourth wife, Jerry Hall, found that, while she was at first welcomed into the fold, she was later iced her out when she enforced a strict pandemic lockdown around her 89-year-old husband at their country home in England. Hall later got an email reportedly informing her the marriage was over.

Lachlan and James reportedly tried to talk their father out of marrying Wendi Deng in 1999. A divorce in 2013 was accompanied by a dispute over whether their two children, Grace and Chloe, would receive voting rights. Deng’s exit from the family was also accompanied by an unfriendly article in the Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch title.

The latest drama, too, arguably has hallmarks of an effort to ringfence the four-times wed patriarch.

Jerry Hall, Murdoch’s fourth wife. Photograph: Danny Moloshok/Reuters

One person with connections to the family said they detected the hand of the four central offspring in Smith’s exit. “Her devout religious views may have been the thorn that drew blood,” they said, adding that some resistance may have come from Elizabeth, 54, and Prudence, 65, rather than James, 50, or Lachlan, 51.

Murdoch and Smith met last September at his Moraga Vineyard in Bel Air, California (Smith, too, had owned a vineyard 300 miles north in Escalon). Others contend they met at Murdoch’s Montana ranch a year before his split from Hall last summer, when the former dental hygienist was said to have offered to check his cavities, claims one Manhattan friend of Hall.

Murdoch of course also has other stresses in his life, including an imminent defamation trial against Fox News in Delaware. Dominion Voting Systems, a company that produces voting machines and tabulators, claims Murdoch’s Fox News and Fox Corporation knowingly spread false information about the 2020 US elections or did so with reckless disregard for the truth. Fox has said the case “is and always has been about the first amendment protections of the media’s absolute right to cover the news”.

Last week, a judge ruled that the case was robust enough to conclude that Fox hosts and guests had repeatedly made false claims about Dominion’s machines and their supposed role in a fictional plot to steal the election. Judge Eric Davis rejected arguments that Murdoch’s age and location, “far-removed from the events in dispute” while under Covid-19 lockdown in England, should absolve him from testifying in person – if attorneys for Dominion subpoena him.

Davis said he had heard Murdoch, chairman of Fox Corporation, publicly discussed his plans to travel with Smith ( the couple said they’d spend their time between California, the UK, Montana and New York). “That doesn’t sound like someone who can’t go from New York to Wilmington,” he said.

Unless it’s settled, jurors will be asked to decide if Fox News’s false claims were made despite the network knowing they were untrue, and to assess damages that could run as high as $1.6bn. Fox News, as a cable news outlet, cannot be stripped of a FCC broadcast license but could have to fend off shareholder complaints.

“If Fox’s reputation is damaged such that it loses money, management is going to be accountable to shareholders,” said the corporate governance expert Charles Elson. “But the difference between news and opinion is so clouded, it’s questionable how much damage a trial can do.”

David Folkenflik, author of Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires, reckons the reports of marital litigation from a previous relationship that have emerged about his ex-fiancee “would be troubling for any media magnate seeking a relatively smooth family control of his public companies and probably even more troubling for his adult children”.

Perhaps, though, the union just did not seem like a good mix. “Murdoch likes to have companionship, and who can blame him?” said Folkenflik. If this was the drama Succession, he added, “this would seem like a character with attributes you wouldn’t want inside the tent no matter how charming she might be.”