We’ve known that Rupert Murdoch has been in on the Succession joke for a while now. Still, according to Vanity Fair, the billionaire media mogul is taking the show’s loose association with his life a little more seriously than we once thought, with a clause in the divorce settlement between Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall preventing her from ever speaking with the writers of Succession.
Murdoch’s divorce from his fourth wife Jerry Hall, which was ended by the News Corp boss over email, was lodged to the Los Angeles Superior Court citing “irreconcilable differences” between the pair. The divorce settlement gave Hall one month to leave the Bel Air estate she lived in with her children and required her to provide receipts for the items she was taking to prove they belonged to her, reportedly watched over by security guards as she went about it.
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However, while that treatment sounds more than fitting for a man capable of a Gmail divorce, one of the items of the settlement specifically stated that, “Hall couldn’t give story ideas to the writers on Succession.” Breathtakingly petty stuff and a sign that public perception is never far from the mind of a man who’s owned vast swathes of the media landscape for much of his professional life.
With such contract wrinkles not enough to ensure Hall behaved herself once she left Murdoch’s life, it’s also reported that when Hall arrived with her children at the Oxfordshire residence she received in the divorce, “she discovered surveillance cameras were still sending footage back to Fox headquarters.” To stop the surveillance of her ex-husband, Hall reached out to her other old flame and “Mick Jagger sent his security consultant to disconnect them.”
Clearly, the divorce didn’t cause Murdoch too much heartache and just nine months later announced his engagement to Ann Lesley Smith. Two weeks after that, it was revealed his planned fifth marriage had been called off.
