Rupert Murdoch is calling it quits on his 14-year marriage to wife Wendi Deng. The media mogul filed divorce papers in the New York State Supreme Court on Thursday, June 13, Deadline first reported.
Murdoch, 82, and Deng, 44, got married in 1999 after meeting at a company party in Hong Kong two years earlier. The couple have two children together.
Deng is currently the chief of strategy for MySpace’s operations in China, but the high-profile pair’s split won’t affect Murdoch’s many media holdings, Deadline.com reports, especially since his News Corp empire is currently in the process of separating its publishing assets from the rest of the company.
The China-born beauty made headlines in July 2011 when she literally jumped to her husband’s defense after Murdoch was attacked by what appeared to be shaving cream during a British Parliament hearing.
Deng quickly leapt from her seat when she saw the approaching protester and summarily slapped him across the face. According to CNN, the man had approached Murdoch, calling him a “greedy billionaire,” when the incident took place.
Murdoch came under fire earlier that year for a wiretapping scandal at Britain’s historic News of the World newspaper after it was revealed that an estimated 4,000 people — including high-profile celebrities like Prince William, Hugh Grant and Sienna Miller — had been victims of the publication’s phone hacking tactics.
“This is the most humble day of my life,” Murdoch told the committee at the hearing.
The Australia-born billionaire had two wives before Deng. He was previously married to Anna Torv for 32 years (the two had finalized their divorce just one month before Murdoch’s marriage to Deng) and Patricia Booker for 11 years, from 1956 to 1967.
