Robert Zeliger is an editor for Foreign Policy
Clearly, the best part of yesterday's tense parliamentary session with Rupert and James Murdoch was when Wendi Murdoch leapt up to defend her husband after a spectator splattered him with a foam pie. She literally jumped over people to slap the man.
Here's the account of an eyewitness in the room:
What you might not have seen is the full instinctive and furious reaction of Mr Murdoch's wife, Wendi. Having sat through the evidence unsmiling, she moved faster than anyone else. First, she swung a slap at her husband's attacker. She followed up by picking up the plate and trying to strike him with it. And then she moved back to her husband. Sitting on the table before him, she started to clear the foam from his face, sometimes embracing him, holding his bald head in her arms.
If you feel like watching her moves repeated in an endless loop, check this out.
Before today, when most people wrote about Mrs. Murdoch, descriptions like "much younger," "third wife," and " social climber" were pretty much de rigueur. And, along with those phrases came negative connotations, of course. Wendi Murdoch, 43, was born Deng Wen Ge in an isolated eastern Chinese city. Her father was a manager at a nearby factory. She left for the United States in 1987 after meeting an older American couple in China who agreed to sponsor her. She moved in with them in California and attended college (she also eventually married the husband and became an American citizen).
That marriage fizzled, as did a subsequent one, before she met Murdoch when she was 30 and he was 68. Though she's remained busy — even producing a movie in China — her public persona has mainly been the woman standing by Murdoch's side at various events.
So, it was interesting to see some of the reaction in China, where her slap quickly became the number one trending topic on a popular micro-blogging service.
The Nanfang website posted a few translated tweets.
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