Rupert Murdoch, 92, announced in Monday’s New York Post that he will wed former San Francisco police chaplain Ann Lesley Smith, 66, in a ceremony later this summer.
The news comes less than a year after the media mogul’s high-profile divorce from Jerry Hall in June 2022; Smith will become his fifth wife – and per an interview with the Post, Murdoch says “my last.”
“We’re both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together,” he said.
Speaking with the Post, Murdoch recalled proposing to Smith on Friday – St. Patrick’s Day – in New York City.
“I was very nervous,” he said. “I dreaded falling in love — but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I’m happy.”
The two met, by Murdoch’s account, last September at his vineyard Moraga in Bel Air, California. “She and her husband also owned a vineyard and had been in the wine business. Last year, when there was 200 people at my vineyard, I met her and we talked a bit. Two weeks later, I called her.”
“For us both it’s a gift from God,” Smith told the paper. “We met last September … 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.”
Smith was previously married to the late Chester Smith, a country singer, radio and television executive.
“In perspective, it’s not my first rodeo,” Smith added. “Getting near 70 means being in the last half. I waited for the right time. Friends are happy for me.”
It’s not the only major headline Murdoch has made in the new year. He and Fox News are currently ensnared in a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems following the news network’s continued promotion and coverage of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election between Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. Murdoch was the subject of remarkable testimony from a deposition revealed Feb. 27, in which he admitted that Fox News hosts “endorsed” on-air what they knew to be a false narrative.
