Billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of the influential News Corp media group, is engaged for the fifth time at the age of 92, one of his tabloids, the New York Post, announced on Monday.
The Australian-born president will marry Ann Leslie Smith, 66, an American-born 1985 former San Francisco police chaplain.
According to “Post,” the lovebirds met last September at one of Rupert Murdoch’s California vineyards, a month after her latest divorce was formalized.
After a few months together, he proposed on St. Patrick’s Day.
“I was very stressed. I was afraid to fall in love – but I knew it would be my last time. It would be good,” she told her tabloid.
For Ann Leslie Smith, a widow for 14 years, “approaching 70 is the last half of her life”. “I’ve been waiting for the right moment and my friends are happy for me,” he told The Post.
The wedding will take place by the end of the summer, the New York Post understands.
Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, American model Jeri Hall, in August 2022 after six years together.
The tycoon, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes at more than $17 billion, owns hundreds of media companies, notably in the United States, along with the companies that control the influential Fox News channel, the business daily The Wall Street Journal and the right-wing New York tabloid, the New York Post. He is also the boss of newspapers in the United Kingdom, the Sun and Times of London, and in Australia.
The billionaire was first married to Australian flight attendant Patricia Booker from 1956 to 1967, and then for more than 30 years, until 1999, after divorcing British journalist Anna Mann, who hit the billion mark. Press at that time.
He later married a businessman of Chinese descent, a graduate of Yale University, Wendy Deng, until they divorced in 2013 in New York.
Rupert Murdoch has a total of six children.
