Laura Ingraham has been a recognizable face at Fox News for several years now. The 60-year-old is somewhat of a polarizing figure on TV, but she’s certainly been successful when it comes to forging a career in an extremely competitive arena.
But what about her private life? Here’s all you need to know about the talkshow host.
Laura Ingraham was born June 19, 1963 in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Her upbringing was one of the working class. Laura’s father, James Frederick Ingraham III, was a World War II veteran and carwash owner.
Her mother, Anne Caroline Kozak, meanwhile, worked at the local school and later as a waitress.
Laura Ingraham’s school life
Ingraham grew up alongside three older brothers. “They were pretty rough and tumble,” she explains.
Perhaps surprisingly, she wasn’t politically involved at school, focusing instead on athletics.
In 1981, she graduated from Glastonbury High School and moved on to college. Ingraham attended the private University of Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire for her undergrad. There, she worked as the editor-in-chief of the prestigious conservative Dartmouth Review school newspaper. Ingraham became its first female editor, and she sure knew how to stir the pot.
“The Review took over my life,” Ingraham told the Hartford Courant in 1999.
“Here you had all these ’60s liberals — who used to be storming administration buildings themselves — in power at Dartmouth, and they didn’t know what to do with this conservative independent paper. I was sued a couple of times for libel by professors. We ended up on ’60 Minutes.’ It was a real catalyst for political involvement — and made doing ‘Crossfire’ look like nothing.”
During her time with the paper, she sent an undercover reporter into a LGBTQ university organization to report on who was attending, according to Business Insider.
Sued at Dartmouth
She interviewed people like conservative pundit and politician William Bennett, Pat Buchanan and American Spectator editor Emmett Tyrrell. However, her spell at the newspaper would also be one embroiled in scandal.
Ingraham came under fire from a lawsuit when the paper was sued for libel by then professor William Cole. She’d written an article about his class which said that his class was “the most outrageous,” on campus, calling him a “used Brillo pad.”
″Mr. Cole is black; he alleges that the Review purposely publishes articles … to defame and ridicule blacks,” Magistrate Jerome Niedermeier said. ″In fact, the Review makes no secret of its opposition to many blacks present at Dartmouth.”
Ingraham didn’t agree at all, calling the lawsuit “absurd”.
″I’m not sure who won but I feel I’ve made a point,″ she said. ″It is a tremendous breakthrough for investigative journalism in the classroom.″
After the two-year libel suit, Cole and the Dartmouth Review signed a 21-page statement agreeing to end the dispute. In addition, Cole had sought $600,000 in damages. He didn’t receive any money.
Ingraham would also work with conservative activist Gary Bauer as a speechwriter for William Bennett.
Speechwriter work
Following her graduation, she went on to work as a speechwriter in the Reagan administration and the Secretary of Transportation. She later returned to school, earning her Juris Doctor at the University of Virginia School of Law.
Ingraham went on to work as a judicial clerk in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York for Ralph Winter, a well-known and respected federal judge.
Then, she worked for Court Justice Clarence Thomas in United States Supreme Court and also for law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. At the law firm, she worked along Bob Bennett, the brother of William Bennett.
“She’s a force of nature,” Bob Bennett said. “She was very able, very bright and had a lot of energy. It was also very clear to me that the law was too confining for her. Listen, if she stuck with practicing law, she would have been a tremendous success. But her real interest and skills lay in politics. She had strong opinions and was very effective in how she articulated them. I thought it would be a good match for her.”
Ingraham’s career in media started off in the mid-1990s. She had her own show at MSNBC named Watch It!.
In 2001, she launched the radio program The Laura Ingraham Show. It was heard on more than 300 stations as well as on XM Satellite Radio. The show was recorded in Washington, D.C, featuring Ingraham’s views on a wide range of political topics.
She also appeared as a frequent guest host of The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, a television network she later would return to.
Becoming a “pundette”
For Ingraham, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was a big thing since it was the start of young conservative women getting airtime as political pundits, known as “pundettes”, according to the Los Angeles Times.
She had talents older pundits didn’t like and were afraid of. Unlike others, she didn’t come from a job in journalism.
“She is young, sexy and ambitious,” journalist Eric Alterman wrote.
“She argues politics the way lawyers argue cases, as if there can be no possible interpretation other than her own, and what can possibly be the matter with her pathetically out-to-lunch opponent?”
In 2004 The Laura Ingraham Show moved to Talk Radio Network and continued growing. She was rated the No. 5 radio show in the US by Talkers Magazine in 2012.
Ingraham also got herself featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in 1995 for a story on young conservatives