Phone hacking: Rupert Murdoch's wife Wendi Deng's dramatic stand-by-your-man display makes her instant star on internet

LONDON: The dramatic stand-by-your-man display by Wendi Deng to defend her husband media mogul Rupert Murdoch in the British House of Commons brawl has shot her to instant fame on the internet.

Her actions have even generated a new online nickname for her in China -- "Smack down sister".

"Her reactions were super-fast! She walks away as the only hero," wrote Zhang Xin, one of the thousands of microbloggers who hit the net within seconds of her acrobatic feat as it came live on TV.

China's enthusiastic microbloggers made the incident one of the most popular topics on the country's Twitter-like service Weibo, even though the hacking scandal had previously attracted relatively little media coverage.

Twitter was set alight with praise for the 42-year-old third wife of Murdoch, with comments suggesting she had made the hearing worth watching, the Telegraph reported.

Deng was the top trending term on Twitter in the UK, with Mrs Murdoch also in the list. Deng, who came from middle-class China to marry one of the world's most powerful media moguls, gave a dramatic stand-by-your-man display.

Deng, who was a school volleyball champion, was dubbed the 'Smack Down Sister' on Chinese websites and gained tongue in cheek praise for her 'left hook' by MP Tom Watson.

The Yale University business school graduate, yoga practitioner and former News Corp employee reacted faster than anyone else seated around Murdoch, including his son James, when the tense questioning by a British parliamentary panel was interrupted by a man throwing a shaving-cream pie at her 80-year-old husband.