With a tiger-like swipe at a protester, Wendi Deng Murdoch became an unlikely hero in defense of her octogenarian husband, News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch.
The 42-year-old third Mrs Murdoch, who came from middle-class China to marry one of the world’s most powerful media moguls, gave a dramatic stand-by-your-man display.
The Yale University business school graduate, yoga devotee and former News Corp employee reacted faster than anyone else seated around Murdoch, including his son James, when the tense questioning by a British parliamentary panel was interrupted by a man throwing a shaving-cream pie at her 80-year-old husband.
She sprang from her seat behind her husband to smack the assailant, in a scene witnessed by millions around the world watching television coverage on Tuesday of the latest developments in the News of the World telephone hacking scandal.
In so doing, Deng made the embattled News Corp chief look vulnerable, and herself strong. However, the incident and her reaction also helped to take some of the heat off of Murdoch, who had looked tired, disconnected and irritable earlier in the hearing.
“That’s our Wendi,” said Vanity Fair writer Michael Wolff, author of a Murdoch biography.
“She is great — incredibly full of energy, incredibly intelligent, living the life and just squeezing everything out of it,” he said. “She is incredibly ambitious.”
Deng, however, has not taken to her own Weibo account to talk about what she did.
With 124,131 followers, her Weibo site is full of pictures of her with celebrities, such as Australian actors Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, and references to her “hubby.”
The daughter of a factory director in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, Deng joined News Corp’s Star TV as an intern in 1996, shortly after getting an MBA from Yale.
She met Murdoch in 1998 when she was a junior executive who acted as his interpreter during a business trip to China. The pair married in 1999 after Murdoch divorced his wife of 31 years.
Her actions have made her a Twitter sensation.
“When I saw Wendi Murdoch last week in NYC [New York City], she told me last week she had to go to London to take ‘care of her man’ ... now I see what she meant,” rap mogul Russell Simmons tweeted.
She came to the US in 1988 after working as an interpreter for a Los Angeles couple — Jake and Joyce Cherry — who were working in China. When they returned to the US, they sponsored her to live with them and to study.
The couple split and Deng had a brief marriage to Jake Cherry. Later she went to Yale and landed a job at Star TV in Hong Kong.
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