Did Joel Klein Help Break Up Rupert Murdoch's Marriage?

Read the entire Michael Wolff piece on Rupert Murdoch's impending divorce to his third wife, Wendi, for a Game of Thrones-like story of familial intrigue, plotting and backstabbing within the Murdoch family and News Corp inner circle, but definitely take note of what happened to Rupert's marriage to Wendi when Joel Klein came aboard:

In a world whose main currency was having Rupert's ear, Wendi had altered the balance of power, to the consternation of executives and family. There followed the orange hair; the Prada suits; the kooky diets. And there was the discordant Wendi voice: not just her accent, widely mocked, but her straightforwardness: her mentioning Rupert's Viagra in Vanity Fair; and her own often hilarious jibs, complete with mimicry, albeit with a Chinese accent, at the other members of Murdoch family.

What to do about Wendi became a major corporate and family preoccupation – and a constant worry for Murdoch himself. Buying the most expensive apartment in New York and having her decorate it was one of Murdoch's strategies to keep her busy. Encouraging her to produce movies was another. Still, he liked being with her. In public, he would take her hand. She became a key aide during his 2007 takeover of the Wall Street Journal.

At least one intimate judged that an abiding concern for Rupert in the 2008 and 2009 period was holding his marriage together – that it was an issue for him of pride. It was important for him not to fail at what everyone said would fail. The winds and cross currents between them were very strong with almost nobody, in the family or in the company, ready to say if they were becoming closer or growing further apart. Not least of all because Rupert, trying to cater to all the various interests of his court, often told people what they wanted to hear.

Vacationing with Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg on Diller's yacht, they appeared to be deeply in love. Not long afterwards, he told his son Lachlan it was over. At some point, Wendi's base of social gravity moved from the media set – David Geffen, Barbara Walters, Ivanka Trump, Arianna Huffington, Graydon Carter – to a different jet set. Dasha Zhukova, the girlfriend of Russian Oligarch Roman Abramovich, and Larry Gagosian, the international art dealer, became her close friends and business partners.

An article in the New York Times quoted sources described as friend's of Wendi as saying she was living more and more an independent life. In fact, she was, trying to hold on to her life, while Rupert, in the company of trainers and message therapists, seemed to be more and more removed from her.

Wendi had made a particular enemy of Joel Klein, the lawyer and News Corp executive who more and more was Rupert's closest corporate confidant and one of the company's chief plotters. What's more, the most damaging results of the hacking scandal for Murdoch had been an increasing breach with his children and an urgency, on his part, to calm the internecine feuding. Wendi, again, was the odd person out, even the expendable one in the Murdoch family.

Interesting how Wendi managed to survive all the various plotters in the Murdoch circle until Joel Klein became Rupert's closest corporate confidant.

Michael Wolff describes Klein as one of News Corporations' "chief plotters" and Wendi as an "enemy" of Klein's.

You have to wonder what poison Klein whispered into Rupert's ear to help move Murdoch toward divorce.

Maybe Wendi Deng took out the wrong guy at the Parliament hearing when she defended her husband against a man attacking him with shaving cream.

Maybe Klein was the real enemy.

How The Murdoch Family Treats The Help

Must read piece in Gawker last week about how Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendi treated a former staffer and tutor of their children:

A former household staffer and tutor for Rupert Mudoch and Wendi Deng's children is speaking out for the first time about the relentless nightmare that is working for the Murdochs: Screaming tantrums, nannies discarded by the side of the road on a whim, no benefits, unpaid overtime, young girls body-shamed by their mother—and near abandonment for workers injured on the job.

Ying-Shu Hsu spent more than year as a full-time Chinese tutor and nanny to Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng's daughters, Chloe and Grace. Six years ago, while holding then 2-year-old Chloe in her arms, she tripped over a tricycle in the Murdochs' Beverly Hills home and fractured her knee, causing permanent damage. Unable to work and cut off from workers' compensation benefits owing to the Murdochs' shoddy paperwork, Hsu was sent packing with a severance payment and told never to contact the family again. She sued the Murdochs unsuccessfully for damages in 2007 (the lawsuit has never been previously reported), and has never been able to work since. She lives off Social Security now.

Read the whole piece. It's horrifying. Wendi Deng comes off much worse than Rupert in the piece, but remember, he's the one paying the staff like this:

Deng, Hsu says, was notorious among her household staff for being cheap, despite her husband's fortune. Food in the refrigerator, Hsu said, was strictly labelled for Rupert and the kids and was hands off for the staff. Hsu's hours were supposed to be from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., but Deng frequently asked her to work later, especially when the family was travelling, and never paid her overtime. Her job included no benefits, paid vacation, or sick leave—perks that are routinely afforded to nannies in New York (and are now mandatory under a recently passed Domestic Workers Bill of Rights). When the Murdochs were away and Hsu wasn't travelling with them, she didn't get paid. Though Hsu's nominal salary at $3,000 per month totaled $36,000 per year, with unpaid vacations and time off when the Murdochs travelled without her, she ended up earning just $26,200 in 2005. For perspective, according to a 2011 survey of nanny employment practices in Brooklyn conducted by Park Slope Parents, 8 in 10 families reported continuing to pay their nanny for regular hours while they were away. And the average Brooklyn nanny received more than 11 paid days off per year.

What's more, the Murdochs' household corporation, KRM Services (as in Keith Rupert Murdoch), classified Hsu as a self-employed independent contractor despite the fact that she was clearly a household employee. According to tax documents disclosed in Hsu's lawsuit against the Murdochs, KRM Services treated Hsu as a 1099 employee and didn't withhold any taxes or pay the employer's share of her Social Security taxes in 2005. IRS guidelines make it abundantly clear that if "you can control not only what work is done" by an employee "but how it is done," then that staffer qualifies as a household employee for whom employment taxes must be paid. There is no question based on Hsu's description of her job that Deng had total control over what she did and how she did it. Indeed, during the course of Hsu's litigation, Deng filed a sworn declaration with the court affirming that she controlled the "time, manner, and place of where Ying-Shu Hsu performed her work [sic].

Here's how Ms. Hsu was injured while in the Murdoch's employ:

In January 2006, while travelling with the Murdochs to their Beverly Hills estate, Hsu was working late caring for Chloe and Grace. At 5:30 p.m., Chloe demanded a certain kind of yogurt that the Murdochs had run out of. Chloe didn't believe Hsu when she told her there wasn't anymore, so Hsu carried Chloe in her arms to the refrigerator to prove it to her. Along the way, she tripped over a tricycle in the kitchen. Since she was carrying a two-year-old, Hsu couldn't maneuver her body to protect herself as she fell. She broke her kneecap.

"My bone was sticking out," she says. A housekeeper rushed her to the hospital, where doctors told her she needed surgery. But the surgeon's schedule was booked, so Hsu spent four days in excruciating pain at the Murdochs' in Beverly Hills, wearing a temporary cast and taking painkillers. "Wendi told me it was no big deal," she said. "Rupert broke his leg skiing once and he was fine."

After her surgery, Hsu recuperated at the Murdochs' for another two weeks before she was well enough to travel home on January 27. When she left, she says, Wendi promised she could come back to work as soon as she was feeling up to it. "She verbally told me, 'After you get better, you can come back,'" Hsu said. Not long after, Deng's secretary sent her a personal check from Deng for $5,000, or just under two months' salary. After that, nothing.

"She never contacted me or followed up," Hsu said. "I tried to contact her in June—I hadn't worked in almost six months. But I could only leave messages, and she never called back. In July, her secretary sent me a check for $3,000 and said, 'You're on your own. Don't bother us any more.'" At that time, Hsu was still on crutches, with two steel pins in her knee. She wasn't in much of a position to seek new employment, but felt that—despite the job's unpleasant aspects—she could have continued on with the Murdochs as Deng, she says, had promised.

...

Through it all, Hsu got nothing aside from a total of $8,000—roughly two-and-a-half months salary—in severance from Deng. Five years after the accident, she walks with a limp. Throughout her long rehabilitation, during which she was severely impaired and in pain, she got none of the workers' compensation benefits to which she as entitled. By the time evidence of her coverage emerged four years later, she had recovered to the point where a doctor no longer found her to be impaired enough for benefits. She moved to Las Vegas, gave up on pursuing anything from workers' compensation, and lives off her Social Security benefits. She feels embittered at both the Murdochs and her own lawyer, James Napoli, whom she feels abandoned her after the Murdochs' belated discovery. And she suspects—without evidence—that Napoli folded in the face of a powerful adversary. Napoli did not return a phone message.

Hsu never spoke to Deng again after the accident. Today, she has a simple message for her: "Treat people fairly and nicely. That's how you keep people. She's mean."

Treating the staff like serfs, cheating on employee taxes and Social Security, trying to cheat an insurance company, dropping an employee injured in his employ like a broken children's toy, and letting his wife terrorize staff like she's Catherine the Great - that's Rupert Murdoch for you.

No wonder he has such disdain for teachers.

He sees us as extensions of the household staff - to be treated the way he and his wife treated Ms. Hsu.