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Rupert Murdoch reportedly won't marry new fiancée with Bay Area ties

Alec Regimbal

Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Ann Lesley Smith, a radio host who has reportedly worked as a police chaplain in the Bay Area, have called off their engagement, according to sources who spoke to multiple news outlets. 

The 92-year-old Murdoch — the owner of Fox News — and the 66-year-old Smith announced their engagement just weeks ago, and had planned to get married this summer. That wedding would have come less than a year after Murdoch finalized his divorce from his fourth wife, American model and actress Jerry Hall.

A source who spoke to Vanity Fair told the outlet that Murdoch had become “increasingly uncomfortable” with Smith’s “outspoken evangelical views.” Regardless of the reason, the news of the seemingly broken relationship comes just 22 days after Murdoch told the New York Post — another publication he owns — that he was nervous about falling in love again and hoped this relationship would be his last. 

“I dreaded falling in love — but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I’m happy,” he said.

A lot is known about Murdoch, a conservative business magnate who owns hundreds of local, national and international news outlets, but less is known about Smith. Vanity Fair reported that she married John B. Huntington, the child of a wealthy California railroad family, sometime in her 20s but divorced him after he allegedly became abusive. The outlet said she found religion afterward and then became a street preacher in Marin County. After her divorce from Huntington, she married country-western singer and business entrepreneur Chester Smith, who died of heart failure in 2008. 

Entrepreneur, a magazine that covers business owners, reported that Smith began her career as a dental hygienist before turning to modeling, and even recorded an album with her second husband. She hosted the “Ann Lesley Live” radio show, which seems to have run on KABC in Los Angeles until as late as 2021. The Washington Post reported that Smith worked as a police chaplain in the San Francisco. The San Francisco Standard later reported that someone named “Ann Lesley-Smith” serves as a chaplain for multiple Marin County police departments.