Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, via email, telling her that “we’ve definitely had some good times, but I’ve got a lot to do,” according to a report about the 92-year-old billionaire. Hall was apparently expecting to meet her husband at their Oxfordshire mansion in June 2022 when she received the unexpected mail.

“Jerry, I have unfortunately decided to end our marriage,” Murdoch’s email reportedly began. “We certainly had some good times, but I have a lot to do… My lawyer in New York will be contacting yours right away.”

Gabriel Sherman, a journalist who has spent decades writing about Murdoch businesses, said he had seen a copy of the e-mail sent to Hall, 66, and analyzed its contents in an article for “Vanity Fair.”

The couple divorced within months and publicly insisted they remained a good couple. However, Hall’s friends said she was devastated and humiliated after caring for Rupert Murdoch and being close to him through his various health problems, while isolating with him throughout Covid.

“On the first day of Lent in February, Hall told her friends that she made an effigy of Murdoch, tied dental floss around his neck and burned it on a grill,” the article claims.

According to the article, the couple’s divorce settlement includes a clause barring Hall from providing plot suggestions to the writers of the TV series “Succession,” which is heavily influenced by internal Murdoch family dynamics.

Just like Logan Roy in the TV series, Murdoch’s four children from his first two marriages compete over who will inherit the business when he dies. While Lachlan is already heavily involved in the family firm, he faces a potential challenge from siblings James, Elisabeth and Prudence, who have either retired from the company or are only minimally involved.

The “Vanity Fair” article details Rupert Murdoch’s troubled health, reporting that Hall has had to treat him for a long time after he badly hit his back in a fall on a yacht in January 2018, leaving him near death.

According to the article, the billionaire was removed from the yacht in the French territory of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, only to discover that there was no hospital open. “Murdoch had to spend the night on a stretcher under a tent in the parking lot until a special medical team could be flown in,” the article said.

It is also claimed that when doctors examined an X-ray of Rupert Murdoch’s back, they asked him about a number of broken vertebrae in the past. Murdoch
he speculated that his clinical picture was due to the fact that his third wife, Wendi Deng, pushed him into a piano during an argument.

Murdoch is facing a difficult time both in his business and in his personal life. In 2019, he sold the majority of his entertainment business to rival media companies. He retained the US Fox network, the HarperCollins book publishing house and a number of newspapers, including the Times, the Sun and the Wall Street Journal. But efforts to reunite the empire – which was broken up to limit the fallout from the News of the World wiretapping scandal – were abandoned earlier this year.

The business causing Murdoch the most trouble is Fox News, which is facing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from voting machine company Dominion after the news channel promoted Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election in the US they were stolen. Jury selection for that trial is expected to begin Thursday, following months of revelations of internal correspondence about Fox News’ operations.

In his personal life, Murdoch recently announced that he had called off his engagement to Ann Leslie Smith, just two weeks after he had used his own tabloid newspaper the New York Post to announce the engagement.

In late March, Murdoch said the couple were “looking forward to spending the second half of their lives together” after buying his bride-to-be a $2 million engagement ring. At the beginning of April the engagement ended, with Murdoch not looking particularly upset…