That Rupert Murdoch's life has turned into a tabloid tale is ... well, more justice than anyone might reasonably ever wish for.

He's on his way to looking like the louche, out-of-control, sex-crazed older men (at 82, he pushes that envelope) who are so joyfully featured in his tabloid properties, the New York Post and The Sun in London.

With more fairness than he is apt to extend, it's worth pointing out that he - like many others caught in tabloid shenanigans - is not a tabloid person. He's controlled and unpretentious, and, while not necessarily a model husband, a loving father. He's a buttoned-down man caught in a perfect storm of uncomfortable and hard-to-control circumstances. Of course, such figures make the most satisfying tabloid tales.

There's his acrimonious divorce from his much-younger wife. There's a trial about to begin in London of some of his closest associates - with embarrassing e-mails involving each other and him. And there's his talkative family, at war with each other. On top of that, his company has been split in two, freeing half to gossip about their old boss.

Divorce is the most reliable tabloid opening. Not only do estranged spouses talk about each other to friends, who then talk about them to their friends, but they put things in court documents.

The worst divorces (or the best, from a tabloid perspective), are pre-nup divorces. One way to negotiate your way out of a pre-nup is to threaten to go public with what you know. A big check buys your silence.

Murdoch, being Murdoch, is said to be adamant about not paying a dime more than his wife, Wendi, agreed to in a pre-nup. Hence, he tried to pre-empt his talkative wife from talking about him by first talking about her. His people, hinting at what damage they could do to her, began saying that Wendi Murdoch has been involved with "a world leader" - soon identified in the non-Murdoch press as former British prime minister Tony Blair, who, violating all rules of rumour management, immediately denied it.

Indeed, Wendi Murdoch seemed cowed. Until she changed lawyers.

Gawker last week reported speculative rumors flying madly around News Corp. and 21st Century Fox (the two newly split Murdoch-controlled companies), and being stoked by Wendi Murdoch partisans. According to the reports, not only has Murdoch had a long-rumored affair with Rebekah Brooks, the former head of his London operation - soon to be on trial for her alleged roles in the phone hacking scandal that's engulfed Murdoch's British papers - but his older son, Lachlan, did, too.

Whoosh! Bam!

The next best thing in tabloid journalism after a divorce case is a sensational criminal trial.

Here's the worst kept secret in London - a secret that London's archaic rules about legal proceedings keep from being published. E-mails in the trial about phone hacking and police bribery by Murdoch employees will show, according to myriad reports circulating on the Internet and broad hints in British papers, that Rebekah Brooks had a long-term affair with Andy Coulson, the former editor of Murdoch's louchest tabloid, The News of the World, which was closed for its part in phone hacking in 2011.

Coulson, also on trial, lost his job at the News of the World in the hacking case. Brooks then helped put him into the job of press secretary for future Prime Minister David Cameron. Her deal, according to theories which the prosecution may pursue in court, was that if Cameron hired Brooks' lover, Coulson, she'd help get Murdoch, who may or may not have been her lover, too (and who never much liked Cameron), to support him.

Add another irresistible tabloid element: The sexual connections of powerful people.

The 45-year-old Rebekah Brooks became the miasma who somehow came to hold the company and the Murdoch family in thrall and who is now, with her e-mail open, possibly their undoing.

Brooks, a constant guest on the Murdoch yachts (tabloid stories are always better with yachts), was once a vital link between the three Murdoch children - Elisabeth, Lachlan and James - who were each vying to be their father's successor. They all loved Brooks, not least of all because their father seemed to love her, too.

Oh, and their stepmother Wendi, who they hated, hated Brooks.

But now, riven by recrimination partly about who really was bamboozled the most by Brooks, the sides are shifting. There were stories last week about Wendi Murdoch moving from a milder divorce lawyer to a much more ferocious one. Her press spokesman was identified as Christopher Giglio, who, as it happens, used to work for Elisabeth Murdoch's husband, Matthew Freud. Freud is a famous London public relations man and, while always a self-interested narrator, the source of the best Murdoch family gossip. And so a tabloid question: Is Freud, despised by his father-in-law, now aligned with his stepmother-in-law?

And the business. At 21st Century Fox - now separated from its former namesake News Corp., and from the money-losing newspapers, and as well Murdoch's day-to-day attention - the sense is of a company that has won the lottery. Still, while the people at Fox enjoy being free of Rupert Murdoch's obtrusiveness, they yet want to be part of the Murdoch story. So they tell it. Compulsively.

Meanwhile, by the by, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and another widely speculated liaison of Wendi Murdoch's, is being given treatment worthy of a vengeful husband by the New York Post.

Murdoch and his family have long been safe from the tabloids by virtue of owning them and, as well, of being able to put everyone else at risk. Now, partly because of Murdoch, tabloidism is everywhere, and Murdoch himself is natural grist for the mill.

Murdoch Becomes Tabloid Subject