Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch files for divorce in New York court from wife of 14 years Wendi Deng

• Murdoch filed for divorce in New York Supreme Court this morning
• Wendi Deng is Murdoch's third wife
• Pair were married in 1999 after meeting in Hong Kong two years before
• His previous divorce to Anna Maria Torv Murdoch was one of the most expensive in history at $1.7billion
• 82-year-old has two daughters with Wendi, Grace and Chloe

By Rachel Quigley and Lydia Warren

PUBLISHED: 11:42 EST, 13 June 2013 | UPDATED: 16:47 EST, 13 June 2013

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has filed for divorce from his wife of 14 years Wendi Deng.

The 82-year-old News Corp chairman and CEO married Wendi, 44, in 1999 after meeting at a party in Hong Kong two years prior.

She is most famously known for punching a man who threw a pie at her husband over the phone hacking scandal during a British parliamentary committee.

A source told MailOnline there is not only a pre-nuptial agreement, but also two further 'post-nups' in 2002 and 2004. The divorce will not have any real effect on News Corporation.

Their 1999 marriage came 17 days after his divorce from ex-wife Anna Maria Torv Murdoch Mann was finalized, which was one of the most expensive in history at $1.7billion.

Scroll down for video

Third wife: Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng's marriage came less than a month after his divorce from ex-wife Anna Maria Torv Murdoch Mann was finalized, which was one of the most expensive in history at $1.7billion

Pay-out?: A source told MailOnline there is a prenuptial agreement in place and the divorce will not have any real effect on News Corporation

Divorce: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendi Deng Murdoch arrive on the red carpet for the 85th Annual Academy Awards in February

Big day: The couple married on a yacht in 1999, 17 days after his divorce from his second wife Anna Torv

New York home: 834 Fifth Avenue where Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng live in a triplex on the top floors. Rupert bought it for $44million in 2005

Triplex: Murdoch and Wendi lived in the top three floors of 834 Fifth Avenue in New York

Beverly Hills Home: One of the many properties Murdoch owns which he could lose in the divorce. Though the couple have a prenup, it depends how water tight it is and Deng is expected to fight for some of his estate

 

Wendi Deng Murdoch said she values her family the most

For more videos, please go to www.JingLiUS.com

Court papers state 'the relationship has been irretrievably broken for the last six months'.

They lived in a $44 million Fifth Avenue penthouse previously owned by Laurance S. Rockefeller and have an impressive portfolio of homes in Los Angeles, London, Canberra, Australia, Carmel, California, and Centre Island, New York.

The Murdochs would have celebrated their fourteenth wedding anniversary in less than a fortnight.

A source told the Mail: 'This divorce is no surprise, it's been on the cards for a while. Wendi and Rupert have been living separate lives. She's a New York fixture and is interested in her own career.'

Ira E. Garr of the law firm Garr Silpe is representing Murdoch in the divorce. He has represented Ivana Trump in the past.

The former couple have two daughters together.

According to the Guardian the pair have filed for joint custody of their children.

A source familiar with the matter told MailOnline that Wendi has no voting stock in News Corp.

Though their two daughters have financial shares in the family trust, they do not have voting shares.

Murdoch's older children by his previous wives have the holding rights. He and second wife Anna had three children — Lachlan, James and Elisabeth.

The couple are said to have clashed over this in 2006 after Murdoch said in an interview that Grace, 11, and Chloe, nine, would be on a level footing in terms of the family's economic trust with his children from his previous marriages, but they would not have the same voting rights.

They are said to have eventually come to a more acceptable agreement.

A year ago, she was profiled in a New York Times story which claimed the couple were leading 'largely separate lives and sleeping in separate bedrooms', a far cry from the show of unity just one year earlier when Deng leaped to the defense of her husband during a grueling question and answering session in British Parliament, punching a protestor who tried to throw a cream pie in his face.

Her actions seemed to give their marriage legitimacy, as she was previously thought to merely be a 'gold-digger' and 'trophy wife'.

Murdoch's net worth was listed at $11.2 billion by Forbes in March, ranking him 33rd on the U.S. billionaire's list.

Deng is reportedly the daughter of a factory director who grew up in the eastern Chinese city of Xuzhou in 1968.

She left for the U.S. whens he was 19-years-old to study and worked in a Chinese restaurant in California before going on to graduate from Yale University in 1996.

While studying at a medical college, she met an American couple, Jake and Joyce Cherry, who had been temporarily relocated to the country to work on a factory. 

She learned English from the couple and they ultimately sponsored her to travel to the United States when she was 19 to take classes at California State University.

But Mrs Cherry soon learned Deng was having an affair with Jake Cherry, who was three decades her senior, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2000.

She ordered the girl out of her home and Jake Cherry followed closely behind. He divorced his wife and married Deng, who was 22.

But they too divorced after he learned she was spending time with a man named David Wolf.

Soon after she was employed as an intern by Star TV, News Corp's Asian satellite-television operation in Hong Kong, where she met  Murdoch during one of his visits.

She approached him and asked: 'Why is your China strategy so bad?'

After the meeting, they discussed media and business, the New York Times reported.

In a biography, Murdoch explained that he met her 'casually once or twice' during meetings at Star TV. Their first date was in June 1998 in London, when she traveled to the city with colleagues from Star.

 

Wendi Deng protects Rupert Murdoch from pie attack

Protection: Wendi Deng lunges towards a man trying to attack her husband during a parliamentary committee hearing on phone hacking on July 19, 2011

Unity: The news of their divorce comes just two years after Deng steadfastly supported Murdoch and his son through the phone hacking scandal that brought down the News of the World

At News Corp, Wendi was involved in the conglomerate's Chinese interests and Internet and film ventures, and she produced the 2011 feature Snow Flower and the Secret Fan for Fox Searchlight pictures. This was largely eclipsed when the phone-hacking scandal emerged.

Deng was described by friends in a New York Times article last year someone who is a world-class networker, collecting powerful friends and brokering connections.

She would host annual dinner parties with powerful women, hosts book parties for friends, and regularly holds get-togethers.

The same article, from June 2012, said the Murdochs had grown to live largely separate lives, with Deng taking the girls to piano lessons and attending red-carpet galas, and Murdoch dealing with the phone-hacking scandal that was unfolding in Britain at the time.

Fortune: Rupert Murdoch's divorce settlement to second wife Anna was the biggest in history at $1.7billion

From left: Lachlan, James, Anna, Elizabeth and Rupert Murdoch before his and Anna's divorce in 1999

Share holders: Rupert Murdoch with his children (from left) James, Lachlan and Elisabeth Murdoch

Gloom: A New York Times report last year claimed the couple were living 'largely separate lives' from different parts of the world

Smiles: James Murdoch with his wife Kathryn Hufschmid accompany Rupert and his third wife Wendy to a party in London

The filing comes just days before the split of News Corp into two companies, one for its entertainment assets and the other for its publishing business.

It was not immediately clear whether the divorce and the company split were connected in any way, though analysts said the end of the Murdochs' marriage was unlikely to have an effect on the corporate separation.

'I doubt it has a substantial impact on the spin,' said Gabelli & Co. analyst Brett Harriss. 'Given that it's his third wife, I see it unlikely that he didn't plan for this contingency.'

News Corp shares were unchanged in midday trading.

Murdoch controls 40 per cent of the voting shares of News Corp through a separate family trust.

The couple's children having shares currently worth around $270million.

Murdoch handed each of his six children $100million in shares in February 2007 and another $60million nine months later.

CHANCE MEETINGS AND A STRING OF AFFAIRS: THE HISTORIES OF RUPERT MURDOCH AND WENDI DENG

Rupert Murdoch and his Chinese-born third wife, Wendi Deng, married on June 25, 1999, just 17 days after his divorce from Anna Maria Torv, to whom he was married for more than 30 years.

He married his first wife, a flight attendant named Patricia Booker, in 1956 and they had a daughter, Prudence, in 1958 before divorcing in 1967. That same year, he married Anna, a journalist working for The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, and they went on to have three children: Elisabeth, Lachland and James.

After three decades, the couple divorced in 1999, with Anna receiving a record settlement of $1.2 billion in assets. She blamed their divorce on Murdoch’s affair with Deng, an employee of his Hong Kong-based company Star TV, and ‘his determination to continue with that. I thought we had a wonderful, happy marriage. Obviously, we didn't,’ she said, calling him ‘extremely hard, ruthless.’

The marriage to Murdoch was not the first for Deng either; her tangled love life was revealed by the Wall Street Journal in 2000.

Growing up as the daughter of a factory worker in Guangzhou in southern China, her childhood was a far cry from the opulence she enjoys today. She lived in a modest home but worked hard at school, where she was a champion volleyball player.

While studying at a medical college, she met an American couple, Jake and Joyce Cherry, who had been temporarily relocated to the country to work on a factory.  She learned English from the couple and they ultimately sponsored her to travel to the United States when she was 19 to take classes at California State University.

But Mrs Cherry soon learned Deng was having an affair with Jake Cherry, who was three decades her senior, the Wall Street Journal reported. She ordered the girl out of her home and Jake Cherry followed closely behind.  He divorced his wife and married Deng, who was 22.

But they too divorced after he learned she was spending time with a man named David Wolf.

After achieving her MBA from Yale, she joined the Murdoch-owned Star TV in Hong Kong as an intern in 1996.

While his company has claimed that Murdoch and Deng met after his separation from his second wife, Anna, sources told the New York Times last year that they met months before in a question session at Star TV.

It was there Deng stood up and asked: 'Why is your China strategy so bad?' But she was not satisfied with his answer and after the meeting, she spoke to him further and they discussed media and business, the New York Times reported.

In a biography, Murdoch explained that he met her 'casually once or twice' during meetings at Star TV. He claimed their first date was in June 1998 in London, when she traveled to the city with colleagues from Star.

'I was a recently separated, lonely man, and I said, "Let's go out to dinner one night", and I talked her into staying in London a couple of extra days - and that was the start of it,' he said.

The couple's wedding ceremony, attended by 81 guests, took place aboard a yacht in the New York Harbor. They went on to have two children: Grace, born in 2001, and Chloe, born in 2003.

The New York Times profile piece noted that while Murdoch transformed following their marriage – hair dye, Prada suits, workouts – Deng was also very much changed. 

While she once never wore makeup and would try to get dresses on the cheap, she was soon traveling around the world with her husband, stocking up on expensive homeware and bedecking herself in designer gowns and jewelry. Friends noted that she has remained the same brash, confident person throughout, however.

The couple’s relationship has not been entirely smooth. In 2006, Murdoch declared in a television interview that his daughters with Deng would not have the same voting rights as his children from previous marriages.

His wife was enraged and friends told the Times she threatened to leave him – but they worked through it.

The piece noted that the couple were living ‘largely separate lives’ as Murdoch struggled to deal with the News of the World phone hacking scandal in London.

Deng's defensiveness of her husband became apparent when she famously protected him from a pie-throwing activist during a hacking hearing in London two years ago.

Deng, showing her athleticism that harked back to her volleyball days, lunged at the attacker to smack him across the head.