For reasons neither of us remember, today my mother told me the not-quite-Cinderella rags-to-riches story of Wendi Deng, the third wife of Rupert Murdoch -- you know, the guy who basically owns all of US journalism. That's probably why I'd never heard of this story until today.
The story began in China when the teenage Wendi met a guy nearly thirty years older than her, Jake Cherry, who persuaded his wife Joyce to sponsor Wendi so that she could go to college in the States. And so, Wendi attended one of the California State Universities and was at the top of her class -- BUT it turns out she ended up having an affair with Mr. Cherry. The Cherrys divorced, and Wendi and Jake married -- but four months later they separated after Jake Cherry discovered that Wendi was seeing another man in his mid-twenties. Supposedly, Wendi told him that she couldn't see him other than as a father figure, but another article I read speculated that Mr. Cherry's salary couldn't support her through graduate school.
In any case, the divorce wasn't finalized until two years later -- just long enough so that Wendi could get her green card. She ended up going to Yale for business school, and eventually she met some important people who got her a job at one of those news stations under News Corp. Another article mentioned how she'd perfected the role of the innocent Chinese girl and managed to step on her colleagues in order to climb her way up -- and she'd always make herself noticed by the top executives. Inevitably, she caught the attention of Murdoch -- and she ended up being his translator for business deals in Asia. Eventually, Murdoch divorced his wife of 31 years and soon after the divorce was finalized, Murdoch and Wendi were married.
The other thing my mother told me that the articles I'd read this afternoon didn't talk as much about was the fact that Wendi had managed to bear two daughters for Murdoch -- despite their age difference and the fact that Murdoch had contracted prostate cancer about a year before their first daughter was born. Supposedly, each of Deng's daughters will each get a piece of the Murdoch inheritance worth about 100 million dollars.
In any case, you're not going to find this story on Wikipedia. My own journalistic curiosity compelled me to look up Wendi Deng on the Internet, and the Wikipedia article was completely wiped clean of any potentially damaging information. The story I've basically summed up is the result of reading a ton of articles this afternoon -- especially one interesting one that focused on Wikiscanner and how it can track the changes corporations make to Wikipedia entries -- including the entry on Wendi Deng.
As much as I am disgusted by what she's done -- destroyed a marriage, tossed countless people aside in order to reach her own goals -- I am still admittedly awed by how she managed to do it. Don't you worry -- my moral conscience would never let me do anything of that sort, and besides, I'm the last person you'd expect to seduce anybody. But the relentlessness with which she climbed her way to the top is astounding; I can only imagine if she hadn't trampled on so many people along the way, think of what kind of Cinderella story she could have achieved -- one that people everywhere would be hailing as another example of the American dream. Instead, you've got a story that almost nobody has heard of because all major media outlets are afraid of making enemies with Murdoch.
Well. C'est la vie américaine.
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