At 70, Jerry Hall FINALLY Opens Up About Why Rupert Murdoch Divorced Her By Email

The Email That Ended Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch’s Marriage Without a Final Fight

Nobody expected Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch’s marriage to end the way it did.

For six years, the former supermodel and the media billionaire had appeared to settle into an unlikely but surprisingly calm partnership.

They married in March 2016 at St Bride’s Church in London, with a reception at Spencer House, a venue steeped in aristocratic history.

Hall was 59.

Murdoch was 85.

The age difference was striking, but so was the contrast between their worlds.

Hall had spent decades as one of the most recognizable faces in fashion and had previously shared a long relationship with Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger.

Murdoch, meanwhile, presided over a media empire that stretched across newspapers, television and publishing.

For a while, their marriage seemed to work.

They traveled together, attended major events and maintained a relatively restrained public profile.

There were no obvious scandals and no dramatic public disputes.

Their last widely confirmed appearance together as a couple came in 2021.

Then the appearances stopped.

By 2022, speculation about trouble had begun to circulate.

Hall was notably absent from an event hosted by Murdoch at London’s Serpentine Gallery, and people close to the situation reportedly began speaking to journalists.

The eventual explanation was astonishingly blunt.

Hall reportedly received an email telling her that Murdoch had decided to end the marriage.

The message allegedly thanked her for the good times but said he had much to do, while directing her to his New York lawyer.

There was no dramatic confrontation.

No explosive argument appeared in public.

No single affair or betrayal emerged as the definitive explanation.

Instead, there was an email.

For Hall, the reported method of ending the marriage was particularly painful.

Friends described her as blindsided and devastated.

She was later quoted as saying that she still loved Murdoch.

That made the mystery even deeper.

If there had been no major fight, what had actually happened inside the marriage?

One theory that emerged involved the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reports suggested that Hall had taken an unusually protective role during the pandemic because of Murdoch’s age.

She reportedly controlled access to him and became something of a gatekeeper, even jokingly referring to herself as the family’s “COVID police.”

The interpretation of that behavior allegedly became a source of tension with members of Murdoch’s family.

Some accounts suggested that his children and inner circle viewed Hall’s vigilance not as devotion but as excessive control.

It is important to distinguish rumor from established fact.

Neither Murdoch nor Hall publicly confirmed that this was the reason their marriage collapsed.

The theory came through unnamed sources and tabloid reporting.

But it offered one possible explanation for an otherwise difficult-to-understand ending.

There was another factor that made the timing particularly intriguing: Murdoch’s professional world was undergoing enormous change.

In 2019, Disney completed its roughly $71 billion acquisition of much of 21st Century Fox, fundamentally reshaping Murdoch’s business empire.

The deal also intensified attention on succession and the future of the Murdoch family’s media holdings.

Inside a family whose wealth and influence depended heavily on control, access and inheritance, questions about who could influence the patriarch were inevitably sensitive.

Hall’s divorce filing added another remarkable detail.

She sought spousal support and legal fees while asking for a full accounting of Murdoch’s assets.

The filing reportedly stated that she did not know the full nature and extent of his separate property, assets and debts.

For an outsider, that detail was extraordinary.

Hall had been married to Murdoch for six years, yet the sheer complexity of his financial world meant that even his wife could apparently face uncertainty over the full scope of the empire surrounding him.

Then came the reported moving deadline.

Hall was allegedly given 30 days to leave the couple’s Bel Air estate.

Reports also claimed she was asked to provide proof of purchase for belongings she intended to take with her.

Whatever the exact financial settlement ultimately contained, the imagery was striking: a six-year marriage being reduced to lawyers, property lists, paperwork and a deadline.

The divorce was finalized in August 2022, only a short time after the initial separation became public.

Lawyers for both sides issued a carefully worded statement describing the former couple as remaining good friends and wishing each other well.

But the speed of what followed suggested that the relationship had been severed decisively.

There was also an unusual reported clause involving Succession, the HBO drama famous for its fictional portrayal of an immensely wealthy media family battling over power and inheritance.

Because the series was widely viewed as drawing inspiration from the dynamics of families such as the Murdochs, reports claimed that Hall’s settlement restricted her from providing story ideas to the show’s writers.

If accurate, the clause would have been extraordinary.

Hall had effectively lived inside the world that the series dramatized from a fictional distance.

Yet even after leaving the Murdoch family, she reportedly could not simply turn those experiences into material for television.

The contrast was almost surreal: a fictional media dynasty inspired partly by real-world power struggles, while the real family reportedly worked to ensure that its private affairs remained private.

Murdoch, meanwhile, moved on with remarkable speed.

Only months before the split with Hall became public, he had become engaged to another woman before reportedly ending that engagement within weeks.

In 2024, he married Elena Zhukova, a retired marine biologist, in a vineyard ceremony.

For Hall, the chapter was over.

Her marriage to Murdoch had lasted six years, making it the shortest of his marriages.

Yet the brevity of the relationship does not explain its intensity or the shock of its ending.

Hall had already endured a famously complicated public relationship with Mick Jagger and had spent decades living under the scrutiny that accompanies celebrity.

She was hardly unfamiliar with heartbreak or public attention.

Still, the Murdoch divorce seemed different.

There was no spectacular betrayal for the public to dissect.

No screaming match captured by photographers.

No obvious final straw.

Instead, there was silence.

A message.

A lawyer’s number.

Thirty days to leave.

And a woman reportedly standing at home expecting her husband to walk through the door as he had countless times before.

That may be the most unsettling part of the entire story.

The public often understands divorce through drama.

There is an affair, an argument, a betrayal, a scandal.

Something happens that gives everyone a neat explanation.

Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch offered almost none of that.

Their marriage simply seemed to reach a point where one person decided it was finished.

The unanswered questions remain.

Was the pandemic truly responsible? Did family tensions play a decisive role? Did succession and control inside the Murdoch empire change the dynamics between husband and wife? Or had the relationship quietly deteriorated for reasons that neither side ever intended to reveal?

Nobody outside the marriage can know for certain.

What remains is an ending that was almost painfully impersonal.

A relationship that began with an extravagant London wedding eventually concluded through legal instructions and carefully negotiated silence.

And perhaps that is why the story continues to fascinate.

The most dramatic marriage endings usually arrive with explosions.

This one arrived in an email.