Is there a bombshell behind Rupert Murdoch’s divorce? A BBC reporter suggests there’s more to come. 
 
 The Murdoch divorce is fast turning into the kind of saga that could sell a million newspapers a day, and in the latest bit of pot-stirring, Robert Peston, the BBC's usually sober and buttoned-down financial correspondent, sent out an extraordinary tweet last night: “‘Am also told that the undisclosed reasons for Murdoch divorcing Deng are jaw-dropping—& hate myself for wanting to know what they are.” 
 
 What could he mean? The incendiary comment is being taken particularly seriously as Peston is said by Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff to be good friends with key Murdoch lieutenant Will Lewis. 
 
 Wolff says: “We can only speculate about what he might mean. However, a year ago, she gave an interview to The New York Times suggesting that they were living independent lives. And Wendi’s emails go through News Corp., so the company surely knows who she is talking to and what she is up to.” 
 
 Wolff’s remark chimes with The Daily Beast’s report yesterday that the couple have been sleeping in separate bedrooms for some time. 
 
 Wolff, added on his Twitter account: "I'm hearing the WHY, the big reveal, the scandal details, could come tomorrow." 
 
 In another tweet he wrote: “Murdoch threatened to do bad things to me (some he did) if I revealed affair w/Wendi started before he left his wife.” 
 
 Peston’s tweet, which slyly suggests he has off-the-record info despite its claim of ignorance, has triggered a predictable guessing game on Twitter as punters attempt to unearth the real reasons behind the split. 
 
 Here are some of the (nonlibelous) ones: 
 
 @asbarboz The reason is money honey. 
 
 @woodoo79 Feels like the press all know the “shocking” reason Murdoch divorce is happening but too scared of the News Corps legal cartel to say it. 
 
 @PTwalnut How ironic would it be if the reason for Rupert Murdoch’s divorce is that the wife doesn’t listen. ||||| Sources say Wendi Deng Murdoch was caught off-guard Thursday when served with divorce papers by husband Rupert Murdoch, even though the couple had grown apart. 
 
 Related Topics • Rupert Murdoch 
 
 Shortly after news broke that the News Corp. mogul is seeking to end his marriage of 14 years, rumors began to circulate of possible reasons for the split. While sources familiar with both Rupert, 82, and Wendi, 44, say they have lived increasingly separate lives, especially in recent months, a precise reason for the split was not apparent. News Corp. is set to divide into two separate companies June 28, though sources say the coming business move was not the primary impetus. 
 
 PHOTOS: Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng Through the Years 
 
 Another theory floated by several sources is that the marriage was strained by Wendi’s socializing and friendships with a series of men over a number of years, including MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe as well as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt. A spokesman for the Murdochs declined to comment. A call to Wendi's attorney was not returned. 
 
 A New York Times profile in June 2012 noted that Rupert rarely accompanies Wendi to the many charitable functions she attends and that her social circle has grown to include Blair, David Geffen, Bono and Nicole Kidman. 
 
 Rumors of a romantic affair with DeWolfe made their way into media reports in 2008, a few years after Murdoch’s News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million. At the time, both Wendi Murdoch and DeWolfe declined to comment. Wendi was “chief of strategy” for MySpace. 
 
 PHOTOS: Hollywood's 16 Biggest Divorces Ever 
 
 More recently, there have been hints of a special relationship with Blair, who is said to be a godfather to at least one of Wendi and Rupert's daughters. In an article titled "Tony Blair and the Murdochs: A Family Affair" in The Guardian last year, author Michael Wolff described Blair as one of Wendi’s “first official social conquests” and suggested that she and Blair had joined forces to “handle” Rupert. Wolfe tweeted in May 2012, “Wendi Murdoch and Tony Blair: you heard it here first,” prompting journalist Jacob Weisberg to tweet, “Are you suggesting what I think?” A source close to Blair categorically denies any romantic relationship. 
 
 Schmidt, said to be friends with Wendi Murdoch, was mentioned in 2010 press reports as having invested with her in the New York-based startup Art.sy, meant to match art with prospective buyers. He has been estranged from his wife, Wendy, and according to media accounts has been linked to other women. The New York Times questioned Schmidt about such relationships in August 2012. His response: "I don’t think that is an appropriate question. We don’t comment on that -- rumors.” A Schmidt friend says it's "doubtful" the Google exec would be romantically linked to Wendi Murdoch. 
 
 PHOTOS: Rupert Murdoch's Family Photos 
 
 Rupert Murdoch met Wendi Deng in 1998 when she was an employee of News Corp.'s Star TV in Hong Kong. They married in 1999 and have two daughters, Grace, 11, and Chloe, 9. In recent years, China-born Wendi has played an increasing role in News Corp.'s business in China, as well as producing the Fox Searchlight release Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Sources say she has acted as an intermediary to Chinese officials for several Hollywood executives. Wendi gained national attention in 2011 when she came to her husband's defense after an assailant attempted to hit him with a pie during a hearing in connection with the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. 
 
 The Times reported that the Murdochs were both in New York on Thursday when Rupert filed for divorce in New York State Supreme Court. The filing said that the “relationship between husband and wife has broken down irretrievably.” 
 
 Rupert is represented by divorce lawyer Ira E. Garr. Pamela Sloan will represent Wendi. Murdoch’s divorce in 1998 from his second wife, Anna Maria Torv, cost him $1.7 billion, though he and Wendi are said to have a prenuptial agreement. 
 
 E-mail: Kim.Masters@thr.com 
 
 Twitter: @KimMasters ||||| When Rupert Murdoch in 1998 announced his abrupt separation from Anna Murdoch, his wife of 31 years, almost nobody at the time, including Anna, had any idea, or could reasonably speculate, that Murdoch, then an old 67, might have a girlfriend. 
 
 But he did. And his divorce and remarriage, and the effect it had on his children, social life and executives, would shape the next generation of his company – a romance for our time, as it were. 
 
 With the curt, and blistering, announcement of his decision to file for divorce from Wendi Murdoch, the young woman he met when she was 28 and working for Star TV, his company in Hong Kong, another upheaval begins. 
 
 It was two summers ago that Wendi burst into the news and transformed her public self from harridan to heroine by, with lightning-fast reflexes, blocking a pie attack on her frail-looking husband in the midst of a difficult testimony in Britain before a committee of parliament investigating the hacking scandal. 
 
 This was to many people in the wider Rupert-Wendi orbit an unexpected turnaround. The informed gossip, always pretty granular in detail, had put them on the outs for sometime. She hadn't even diverted from a promotional tour for a movie she'd produced – until the last minute – to be in London with her up-against-it husband. 
 
 Murdoch had told his oldest son, Lachlan, that he'd concluded that marrying Wendi was a "mistake" – or so Lachlan, along with his siblings never a fan of his father's remarriage, was telling people. And during the many months that I was interviewing Murdoch in 2008 for my book about him, we would sometimes meet on weekend mornings at his apartment where it quite appeared he had not slept the night – but, rather, had arrived minutes before me with clothes bundled in his briefcase. 
 
 Indeed, if you imagined two opposite people, save only for their evident mutual ambition, it might be Rupert and Wendi. 
 
 Rupert, the cold, cryptic, scowling, impersonal, rock-hard conservative Australian aristocrat, with his four adult children unable to get over his marriage to the woman 39 years his junior. And Wendi, the energetic, ebullient, social creature, with natural liberal tendencies, whose first job in the US was at a Chinese restaurant and who had given him – "from the fridge", after his prostate cancer – two young Chinese children (and moved her parents to New York). 
 
 And yet, something seemed to work, too. 
 
 There was the orange hair dye; the workout regimes; his protestations that he had finally learned how to be a good father; and his new friendship with, gasp, liberals. David Geffen, via Wendi, became one of Rupert's closest confidants. 
 
 Certainly, business seemed to energize them. I often heard them, like teenagers in love, talking on the phone – albeit about business deals and, more than not, from different cities. I even saw them holding hands. 
 
 But his children continued to dislike her. Even when they made every effort to tolerate her, it was with clenched teeth. And his mother, who died this past year, always refused to meet Wendi. 
 
 For her part, Wendi remained ever-furious with him for not standing up to his children – which included locking their children out of full participation in the trust that controls all the Murdoch assets. 
 
 She led a glamorous social life. In effect, she was the center of the jet set. It followed her: Hollywood, the art world, international super stars. She rejuvenated the jet set. 
 
 Rumors about their relationship dogged them. When the LA Times threatened to go public with a supposed story of infidelity, News Corp had lawyers debrief both husband and wife and convinced the paper to kill its story. 
 
 Robert Peston, the BBC's financial correspondent, who is said to be a close friend of Will Lewis, a key Murdoch lieutenant, tweeted that the real facts of the break-up are "jaw-dropping": 
 
 Am also told that undisclosed reasons for Murdoch divorcing Deng are jaw-dropping - & hate myself for wanting to know what they are — Robert Peston (@Peston) June 13, 2013 
 
 We can only speculate about what he might mean. However, a year ago, she gave an interview to the New York Times suggesting that they were living independent lives. And Wendi's emails go through News Corp, so the company surely knows who she is talking to and what she is up to. 
 
 And yet, during the past year, what people have most noticed is their closeness. She had seemed to become his key adviser, close enough that there has been speculation she would go on the board of the newspaper company being split from the larger entertainment company. 
 
 She had also become, to his children's ever-greater consternation, his gatekeeper. Outsiders did not get to Rupert without going through Wendi. 
 
 But now the split is dramatic. As harsh as the split from Anna. 
 
 And in the fashion that Rupert does things – peremptorily, wrathfully, implacably – it would seem to leave Wendi far out in the cold. There is her 1999 pre-nup, and, to boot, two post-nups. What's more, it is a fearsome thing when News Corp and the Murdoch family close their ranks against you. Indeed, it is not that easy to hire a law firm not conflicted out by its work for News Corp, or the promise of work. Her PR aide, Steven Rubenstein, is on Rupert's payroll – so his help disappears. 
 
 Except, of course, that Wendi knows all Murdoch's secrets. All of them. 
 
 • This article was amended on 17 June 2013 to correct "lightening" to "lightning". ||||| EXCLUSIVE 9 AM, 4TH UPDATE 11 AM WRITETHRU (new details): News Corp Chairman/CEO Rupert Murdoch filed for divorce from wife Wendi Deng Murdoch this morning in New York State Supreme Court, Deadline learned at 9 AM. The divorce will not impact Rupert Murdoch’s mega-media holdings, according to insiders, and was deliberately announced for maximum transparency before News Corp spins off its publishing assets into a separately traded company by June 28th. (Murdoch will control both of these entities.) Wendi is perhaps most vividly and fondly remembered by the general public in July 2011 for standing up for her husband and clocking Jonathan May-Bowles after he threw a pie at Murdoch during his highly publicized British parliamentary testimony in connection with the News International phone-hacking scandal. (“Mr Murdoch, your wife has a very good left hook,” the chairman of the House Of Commons panel said admiringly. Wendi quickly earned the nickname of ‘Tiger Wife’ on Twitter.) Today’s divorce news comes despite numerous denials by PR man Steven Rubenstein and News Corp PR woman Julie Henderson to me as recently as April and May. (“We get this phone call once every 3-6 months,” Rubenstein and Henderson said at the time, pointing to the fact that Wendi and Rupert had recently hosted a dinner at their home for Oscar-winning Twentieth Century Fox director Ang Lee and were going away together on Spring Break.) But legal sources insisted to Deadline that the Murdochs’ divorce was being planned at the same time that a change in Wendi’s behavior towards Rupert was observed during the Academy Awards in February and after. ”She was snippy with him during Oscar weekend, and she’s really impatient with him these days,” a source told Deadline then. I received a call from an insider telling me, “Now I’m hearing it might be true. Call me,” On the heels of that, for the first time, not even Murdoch’s reps were denying yet another rift between Rupert and Wendi, saying to me there had been marriage trouble but stressing ”it feels like its past whatever that was.” A source who had dinner with them shortly after in NYC told me they were “fine. They’re two people who move a lot in different directions. I don’t know if it’s the marriage I’d want.” But another insider acknowledged to me, “I can’t say it might not be true that they’ll divorce. They have ups and downs. Right now it feels to me, having spent time with them, that they’re in a good place.” There is no question that despite divorce clouds Murdoch’s #1 priority was the News Corp split, not his from Wendi’s, and ”to get it done and get it done right. So he’s had a lot on his plate. What was once one is now two,” an insider explained to me at the time. “The company is so big, so diverse, so complex, and now he has to recalibrate and reaggregate these businesses while the Street determines their true value.” Today I’m told by insiders that, at that time, there were still no divorce proceedings underway so the denials were issued in good faith. “The divorce happened very quickly,” an insider told me today without details. 
 
 Media moguls routinely divorce, and Deadline doesn’t cover Hollywood’s personal lives, but this split is notable only because of its possible impact on the News Corp split or the Murdoch family succession vis a vis its corporate holdings given the patriarch’s age of 82. “I don’t see anything to indicate that shareholders have a lot at stake if Rupert and Wendi split,” one prominent media analyst tells me. “News Corp paid her $92,000 in 2010 to provide some ‘strategic advice’ regarding MySpace in China. But that’s not even pocket change, and ended three years ago, She’s not on the board, and not an executive. And since she and her kids don’t have voting rights in the family trust, she doesn’t have leverage to influence succession. I suppose that investors might become nervous if she decided to spill some News Corp secrets, or distracted Rupert so much that he’d spend less time taking care of business. But that’s thin gruel.” As for News Corp’s obligations to keep Wall Street and shareholders up to date on this kind of personal matter, “They have to report ‘material’ information on a timely basis. A lot of wiggle room there.” The analyst added: “So, yes, they make a judgment call — and hope they can justify it if the SEC raises a question – which it usually doesn’t. Sarbanes-Oxley sought to promote full and truthful disclosure of corporate financial information, and to minimize opportunities for insider trading. It requires companies to release certain kinds of data and information, with top execs confirming that they’ve reviewed the material and attest to its completeness and accuracy. But the effort to level the playing field has made many execs — and especially their press handlers — fearful that they’d violate the law if they share information casually or off the record with analysts and reporters, a once-common practice.” 
 
 The couple met in 1997, at a News Corp party in Hong Kong where she worked at Murdoch-owned Star Television. They married in 1999, less than a month after his divorce from ex-wife Anna Maria Torv Murdoch was finalized. Rupert and Wendi were married on his yacht in New York Harbor in June 1999 after Murdoch’s ex-wife, received $1.7 billion — $110 million in cash — in what was called the “most expensive” divorce settlement in history. Although at first they broke up amicably after 30 years together, Anna (who has since remarried) was determined to give Murdoch’s older children the right to approve any change in the family trust that controls News Corp, ensuring that they could not be pushed aside for any new children. As part of the divorce from Anna, Rupert agreed that his existing children would inherit control of News Corp via the family trust. Wendi wanted that changed after giving birth to their two daughters, Grace and Chloe. But Rupert punted, then actually startled Wendi by disclosing in a 2006 Charlie Rose TV interview that Deng’s girls would not have voting rights in his family trust. He said they’d have an equal economic stake, but the decision-making would be left to Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James. “The fight that happened between Rupert and Wendi, after the program aired, is News Corp legend,” Michael Wolff wrote in his book The Man Who Owns The News: Inside The Secret World Of Rupert Murdoch. 
 
 Since then, news reports noted that Wendi emerged with her own independent career and immersed herself in a social circle that includes David Geffen, Larry Ellison, Tony Blair, Nicole Kidman and Bono “one that is often free of her husband’s presence,” to quote The New York Times. She is co-founder and co-CEO of the film production company Big Feet Productions. With the wife of former MGM exec Harry Sloan, Wendi co-produced the 2011 film Snow Flower And The Secret Fan, which was released by News Corp’s Fox Searchlight. (It generated $11.3M in global ticket sales, including $1.3M from domestic theaters.) 
 
 The marriage is Rupert’s third, and Wendi’s second. The Wall Street Journal disclosed in a controversial front page article in 2000, before Murdoch bought it, that she met her first husband in 1988 when she moved to Los Angeles to learn English. She lived with Jake and Joyce Cherry, and broke up their marriage by having an affair with Jake. She married him in 1990, but they divorced after two years and seven months. “That was seven months longer than what was required for Deng to obtain a green card, allowing her permanently to live and work in the U.S. as a resident alien,” the paper noted. “Cherry says he and Deng actually lived together for ‘four to five months, at the most.’” 
 
 According to news reports, Deng was born in Shandong, China, in 1968 to engineer parents. She was named Wen Ge, which is shorthand for “Cultural Revolution”. Once in the United States, she studied at Cal State before receiving an MBA from Yale University. 
 
 Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
– The gossip mill is churning in the wake of the Rupert Murdoch-Wendi Deng divorce filing. As the Hollywood Reporter notes, Deng's friendships with prominent males from Tony Blair to Eric Schmidt are being poked at (Blair's rep firmly denies the former British PM and Deng "are having an affair"). But sources say Deng was surprised to be served with divorce papers, even though she and Murdoch have been growing distant in recent months (and have been sleeping in separate bedrooms for a while, according to the Daily Beast). The BBC's business editor, Robert Peston, (who, the Daily Beast notes, is "usually sober and buttoned-down") tweeted last night, "Am told that undisclosed reasons for Murdoch divorcing Deng are jaw-dropping - & hate myself for wanting to know what they are." Writes Newser founder Michael Wolff in the Guardian, "We can only speculate about what he might mean." But, he notes, Peston is close with "key Murdoch lieutenant" Will Lewis. And we could be hearing more soon: Wolff tweeted last night, "I'm hearing the WHY, the big reveal, the scandal details, could come tomorrow."