She’s a beautiful and brilliant scientist who left Soviet Russia as a single mother – and ended up living in a Beverly Hills mansion. So no wonder Rupert Murdoch is smitten with Elena Zhukova, write RICHARD KAY and ALISON BOSHOFF
These summer days might have been spent quietly tending her tidy garden at the spectacular villa her daughter bought for her in a quiet corner of Beverly Hills.
She is long retired from her academic work as a molecular biologist and there would have been visits from children and grandchildren who love to splash in the kidney-shaped pool with their adored babushka.
Instead, at the age of 66, Elena Zhukova has found herself at the centre of international intrigue as the new companion in the life of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
Ever since the Daily Mail’s exclusive revelation that they were holidaying together on the Christina O, the legendary pleasure boat on which Aristotle Onassis seduced JFK’s widow Jackie Kennedy, the world has pored over photographs of the two to see what they tell us about the wily nonagenarian, whose capacity to surprise seems as undiminished as his appetite for female companionship.
Just months ago, the owner of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and The Sun had created headlines by announcing his engagement to a vivacious divorcee who had described their betrothal as ‘a gift from God’, only for him to call it off weeks later.
New love: Elena Zhukova (pictured) has found herself at the centre of international intrigue as the new companion in the life of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch
Murdoch has been married — and divorced — four times, yet he remains, it appears, an incurable romantic.
Since marriage number four to model Jerry Hall, the ex-wife of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, there has been something rather touching about his amorous adventures. Admirers liken him to a brilliant but ageing composer determined to write one more great work while his faculties still allow it.
But this time the focus of fascination is not just Murdoch but his attractive, dark-haired girlfriend, whose socialite elder daughter Dasha was once married to Roman Abramovich, a household name in Britain thanks to his former ownership of Chelsea football club and the sanctions he was hit with after the invasion of Ukraine.
Such is Elena’s intersection with money and glamour that Tatler magazine could barely contain itself in describing her this week as ‘Rupert Murdoch’s ultimate power match’ thanks to her position at the heart of an influential nexus which encompasses the art world, Russian oligarchs and a famous Greek shipping dynasty.
But what of the woman herself? The story of her life in the Soviet Union and then comfortable retirement in sunny California after the Communist era is one not just of hard work and enterprise, but also of some extraordinary twists of fate.
Elena’s most remarkable piece of good fortune came when her daughter met Abramovich, who was once said to be worth £11 billion. She was transported into the world of the super-rich with a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom home bought for her by Dasha in ritzy Beverly Hills with its coveted 90210 zip code.
Couple: Ever since the Daily Mail’s exclusive revelation that they were holidaying together on the Christina O, the world has pored over photographs of the two. Pictured: Elena and Rupert Murdoch
At 51 she retired from her job at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she held an appointment in medicine-gastroenterology, due to illness.
Dasha, an art entrepreneur, after marrying and divorcing Abramovich, is now the wife of shipping heir Stavros Niarchos — a former love of socialite Paris Hilton.
What we have learned about Elena is that behind the engaging smile that has bewitched the media magnate lies a steely and resilient woman.
She left Moscow for the U.S. in 1991 to take up a post at a Texas university as part of the Russian ‘brain drain’ after the former USSR imploded.
Still more impressively, she was also a single mother — her marriage to Dasha’s father had ended when their daughter was three.
READ MORE: Revealed: Rupert Murdoch, 92, is dating retired scientist Elena Zhukova, 66 – the mother of Roman Abramovich’s ex-wife – after meeting her through Wendi Deng
When a second romance in America broke up, she raised the twins born during the relationship — a boy and a girl, Yuri and Katya — without any financial input from their father, it can be revealed.
Elena has made no public comment about these domestic challenges — unlike her children.
Some years ago, Katya, now 31, chose Father’s Day to share an illuminating post about the man she called her ‘deadbeat dad’, George Gause.
Instead of him, she wrote, she was thinking ‘of what an amazing mother I have and how nothing could be better’. Indeed, Katya is invariably affectionate about her mother, endearingly recalling how Elena was so ‘clumsy’ she once dropped a mobile phone in a bowl of borscht (beetroot soup) and how she was 54 before she learnt to ride a bike.
The stereotypical Russian enthusiasm for consuming great quanities of alcohol features in Katya’s social media posts.
‘My life is so Russian,’ she declared after her mother’s friends tried to entice her into drinking with them.
In 2013 she wrote of her maternal grandmother, who settled in America to help her daughter Elena with the children: ‘Grandma sitting at the table in a faux fur vest, a shot glass of vodka in one hand, a shot glass of tequila in the other.’
Later she added: ‘Grandma is picking her teeth with a sharp knife #drunk #Russians.’
Katya, a gallerist like her elder sister, recently married Kour Pour, a part-Iranian artist. Exuberant pictures of the wedding day fill her social media accounts.
Her tousle-haired twin brother Yuri, who uses the surname Chigirinsky, is a musician and composer working in the film industry. He is described as being gifted with ‘perfect pitch and the ability to quickly learn musical parts and instruments’.
Daughter: This time the focus of fascination is not just Murdoch but his attractive, dark-haired girlfriend, whose socialite elder daughter Dasha (right) was once married to Roman Abramovich (left)
Elena’s seemingly contented family life seems a long way from the moneyed world of high finance and influence of which Murdoch is such an enthralling part.
Yet she has been no stranger to extreme wealth, although it wasn’t always like that. The story begins when Elena was born in Moscow in January 1957 into an intellectually elite family. ‘It was the usual, normal Moscow intelligentsia,’ Elena later told a journalist who was profiling daughter Dasha.
Elena’s father was Lev Izrailevich Rudnitsky, a writer and director of the Moscow International Film Festival. He was married to Maria, Elena’s mother, though reports in a Russian newspaper suggested that they later divorced. The family were Jewish and home was a central Moscow flat on Alexey Tolstoy Street.
As a teenager studying molecular biology, Elena ran into tall and handsome fellow student Alexander Zhukov. Intriguingly, Alexander’s given name was Radkin but he adopted his mother’s maiden name of Zhukov — a fabled surname in Russian history because of its association with the World War II hero Marshal Zhukov.
READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Pictured relaxing and in holiday mode, Rupert Murdoch and his new companion Elena Zhukova… a brilliant molecular biologist, 66, who was once Roman Abramovich’s mother-in-law
After graduating, he had a job as a cinema projectionist which he ditched to start buying and selling personal computers. The couple married and their daughter Daria, known as Dasha, was born in 1981.
The marriage did not last but Alexander’s entrepreneurial skills prospered. He became involved with energy trading and began to accrue serious wealth.
Recalling her childhood, Dasha said: ‘I went to museums and the theatre, I remember going to the circus a lot . . . I had a happy childhood, extremely outdoorsy and independent. Moscow was very safe in those times, I had a lot of freedom, you could take the subway across the city on your own when you were eight.’
In 1991, Elena was offered a post to do research into diabetes at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. It was a step into an unknown world but as Dasha explained of her mother: ‘She really didn’t like what was happening in the medical community in Russia and the attitude towards the scientists. Once communism fell, to really make a living you would have to deal essentially with the hustlers.
‘My mother couldn’t find a place for herself where she was comfortable. Before, it was an educated group, the intelligentsia — then suddenly you needed a whole different set of skills to survive. She just didn’t feel like she wanted to be part of that.’
Mother and daughter moved into an unprepossessing apartment in a city where they knew almost no one.
‘It was a culture shock,’ Dasha said. ‘I had never seen (breakfast) cereal before! We had cottage cheese and pancakes in Russia, not colourful circles that came in cardboard boxes.’
When Elena had only been in the job a few months, the Soviet Union collapsed and she decided she would stay in the U.S. Baylor College of Medicine confirmed this week that Elena was a research employee from 1991 to 1994.
In May 1992, Elena gave birth to the twins. It is not known if she and George Gause, the father, ever married. He is understood to have died in 2019, long after they split up.
Little is known of him or their relationship, but it didn’t last and there is a suggestion that Gause went on to have a second family with another woman.
In 1994, with two-year-old twins and 13-year-old Dasha, Elena sent for her mother Maria to help her raise her family in Houston. Her father Lev remained in Moscow, where he died in 1999.
Soon after Maria’s arrival came the job offer from UCLA and the family relocated to Los Angeles. Elena’s mother stayed in the U.S. until her death in 2019, aged 95.
By now, Dasha’s father Alexander was seriously wealthy and paying for his daughter’s private education at exclusive Pacific Hills school in West Hollywood.
Dasha was turning into a strikingly beautiful and capable young woman. Her father had settled in London, like many of the oligarchs who enriched themselves in the post-Soviet free-for-all, and she would frequently fly to Europe for luxury holidays.
His money paid for tennis lessons and an extravagant lifestyle. An early idea that she might follow her mother into science was dropped — she found chemistry too daunting. Instead she enrolled at UC Santa Barbara and read Russian literature.
Elena’s career was also flourishing. She was employed full-time at UCLA from June 1994 to March 2007 and wrote a number of academic papers.
Former colleague James Sinnett-Smith, a scientist, told us: ‘Her expertise was in molecular biology. We worked together quite a lot, and she was an accomplished scientist and also a very nice person, always helping people. She was certainly respected among her peers.’
There were setbacks along the way, not least when Elena’s former husband Alexander Zhukov was held in prison on gun-running charges in 2001. He spent six months in an Italian jail on suspicion of being involved in arms dealing during the Balkans civil wars; no charges were filed and he was later released.
By this time he was a very wealthy figure in the oil business — he is said to be worth around £5.5 billion — and a controversial one. An investigation by the Guardian newspaper suggested he had paid no tax for 13 years as a UK resident, thanks to a complex web of offshore companies, as revealed in the Panama Papers, a 2016 leak of confidential documents.
In 2005, his daughter Dasha went to London to live with him and was one of the capital’s ‘Itski girls’, mixing easily with the offspring of other wealthy families. Lord Freddie Windsor, Princess Michael of Kent’s son, was a friend.
There was a romance with Russian-born tennis player Marat Safin — and then Dasha caught the eye of married oligarch Roman Abramovich, then 40 to her 24. They were married after his divorce in 2008 and overnight, her mother Elena’s life changed — not least with her new home worth £7 million. A former UCLA colleague said: ‘She already came from a wealthy background, then her daughter married Roman Abramovich.’
First and foremost, her priority post-retirement was being a mother and grandmother. Dasha and Abramovich had a son, Aaron, born in London in December 2009, followed by Leah Lou, born in New York in 2013.
Dasha went on to have another son, Philip, with her second husband, Niarchos.
Through her marriages, Dasha has become a well-established fixture on the super-rich art scene in New York — where she is on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art — and her mother has accompanied her to high-profile, high-culture parties.
Which brings us back to Murdoch. One of Dasha’s art-world associates is Wendi Deng, the magnate’s third wife and mother of his two youngest children. It was Wendi who hosted the large family gathering where the couple met earlier this year.
As a man who never lets the grass grow under his feet, Murdoch was captivated by the slim Russian, 26 years his junior, and invited her to spend time with him and his extended family — including daughters Grace and Chloe Deng — on their summer cruise.
Inevitably, the focus has not just been on what may be a budding romance, but also on money. After four marriages and one broken engagement, Murdoch knows that the path to lasting happiness has been costly.
But stories of lavish settlements on his ex-wives have been embroidered with the passing years. We understand that Wendi and Jerry, for example, received a fraction of the deal made to Anna, his second wife, to whom he was married the longest.
Even Anna’s settlement was nowhere near the $1.7 billion figure that was freely bandied around at the time of their divorce.
Does all this matter? Through her daughter Dasha, Elena has been comfortably rich for years and has been at home in a wealthy milieu of private jets, luxury yachts and multiple residences.
What happens next remains to be seen, but it does seem Rupert Murdoch is keen to fill the vacancy for a consort.
His romance with radio personality and former dental hygienist Ann Lesley Smith ended in April this year, only a few days after they announced that they were engaged. They had been dating for just seven months.
He became engaged to fourth wife Jerry Hall after a whirlwind five-month courtship, placing an announcement of their engagement in The Times in January 2016 and whisking her up the aisle in March.
Might this new love affair progress at a similarly brisk pace?
Elena’s old colleague James Sinnet-Smith says he was unaware of the pictures of her on holiday with Rupert Murdoch, but added with a chuckle: ‘Good luck to them.’
Additional reporting: Barbara McMahon in Los Angeles, Daniel Bates in New York and Will Stewart in Moscow
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