Rupert Murdoch, 92, announces engagement to girlfriend Elena Zhukova, 67, and reveals plans to marry in June

Rupert Murdoch, aged 92, has announced he is engaged to retired scientist Elena Zhukova, 67, after meeting her through his third wife Wendi Deng.

The Fox patriarch started dating Zhukova over the summer after his previous engagement to former police chaplain and vineyard owner Ann Lesley Smith was called off just two weeks after it was announced. 

DailyMail.com revealed the couple started dating in August when the two were spotted cruising the Mediterranean on a family summer holiday.

She is the mother of Dasha Zhukova, a Russian socialite who is famous for her marriage to Russian oligarch and former Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich.

Dasha and Murdoch’s third wife Wendi Deng are great friends in New York and it seems that this is the connection. ‘They met through Wendi and Dasha’, said a source.

Invitations for the wedding have been sent out and the event is to be held in June at Murdoch’s California estate, Moraga, reported The New York Times. 

Zhukova is a twice-divorced molecular biologist and specialist in diabetes. She has lived in America for over three decades after leaving Russia in 1991 with her daughter.

Before retiring she worked at the medical research unit in UCLA. Sources said she spends a lot of time with her grandchildren by Dasha and Roman.

Dasha, 42, divorced Abramovich in 2019 and her settlement included a four-story house in Manhattan. She is now married to Stavros Niarchos, the billionaire heir to the shipping dynasty.

Murdoch, who has been married four other times and has six children, announced that he was stepping down as chairman of Fox and News Corp in September.

His eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, took over as chair of News Corp and continued as executive chair and CEO of Fox News parent Fox Corp.

The media tycoon was previously got engaged to Smith in March 2023, just six months after the pair first met – and less than a year after his divorce from fourth wife Jerry Hall was finalized.

‘I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love — but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I’m happy,’ he told The New York Post at the time of his previous engagement.

He has six children from his previous marriages: daughter Prudence MacLeod, now 66, with his first wife Patricia Booker, daughter Elisabeth, now 55, and sons Lachlan, now 52, and James, now 51, with his second wife Anna Mann, and daughter Grace, now 23, and Chloe, now 21, who he shares with his third wife Wendi Deng.

Murdoch and his fourth wife, former supermodel Hall, did not have any children together during their six-year marriage.

The pair tied the knot in London in March 2016 in a very low-key ceremony at Spencer House, which overlooks Green Park, after a whirlwind five-month romance. 

Murdoch married his first wife, former flight attendant Patricia, in 1956, however the pair split in 1967, nine years after the birth of their only child, Prudence.

That same year, he tied the knot with his second wife, Anna, a Glasgow-born journalist to whom he was married for 32 years, before their divorce in 1999.

As part of their divorce settlement, Anna was awarded $1.7 billion, including $10 million in cash, according to CNBC.

Murdoch went on to marry Wendi just 17 days after he divorced second wife Anna. At the time of their wedding Murdoch was 68, while Wendi was just 30 years old.

That marriage lasted 14 years, before it was announced that the pair were divorcing, with a News Corp spokesperson revealing in June 2013 that their union had been ‘irretrievably broken for more than six months.’