Vanity Fair’s 12-page investigation into the life and times of Rupert Murdoch, 82, and his third wife Wendi Deng, 45, is finally out. It’s a rip-roaring read, with allegations veering from schoolgirl crushes to adultery to bullying behaviour towards staff and what Americans call ”elder abuse.” Never mind unbelievable bad taste. It’s a good old-fashioned hatchet job of the kind Murdoch usually rewards his own reporters richly for. He’s probably not so delighted when the subject is him and his upwardly mobile Chinese bride of 14 years, but hey ho, live by the sword, die by the sword.
I wonder what he thinks of his ex-wife now. They married in 1999 and divorced in November and thanks to a prudent pre-nuptial agreement, the settlement probably cost him less than the US$1.7 billion (HK13.2 billion) he forked out to Anna, his second wife of many decades and mother of Elisabeth, Lachlan and James. He and Deng have two much younger daughters. The Murdoch family fortune is reportedly about US$14 billion.
Cringe-making
Vanity Fair somehow dug out what purports to be a “memo to self” by Deng. In gushing girly prose and broken English, she sounds like a fixated teenager, infatuated with, believe it or not, a certain “Tony,” being former British prime minister Tony Blair.