It’s just after 9:30 am and Ainsley Earhardt’s working day is already all but done.
As a co-host of Fox News’s weekday morning show, Fox and Friends, she has been on air since 6:00 and up since 3:30.
Earhardt, 48, has now changed out of the slimline cornflower blue pants and top that viewers saw on screen into something less ruthlessly constricting: A smart boucle jacket and cream pants.
She briefly stops to say hello to a pair of Fox News fans outside the network’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters – the high-wattage smile she sports on set still on full blast – and we slip into the backseat of her black SUV for a short ride to her Park Avenue apartment.
Then, her phone rings.
‘Sunshine!’ a male voice booms.
It’s cable news legend Sean Hannity, Earhardt’s fiancé.
He calls at this time every day.
‘Sunshine,’ as Hannity, 63, explains to the Daily Mail, which was given exclusive access to interview Earhardt, is his pet name for her because she ‘wakes up America’ and – as I can confirm – is always smiling.
Yet there is far more to Earhardt than the sunny affect that she presents to her fans each morning.
There is far more to Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt than the sunny affect that she presents to her fans each morning
When Hannity first asked Earhardt out, she says, ‘We asked our boss first. I said, ‘I really want your support because I’m crazy about this guy”
In an extraordinarily candid and often emotional interview, the Fox News star opened up about her ‘hard times,’ from the grief that followed the death of her beloved mother to the pain of her divorce from the father of her nine-year-old daughter, Hayden.
But, Earhardt told the Daily Mail, ‘Even in the bad times, I saw God, I knew that He was with me and felt His presence and it lifted me up and carried me through.’
Hers is a story of faith, redemption and the unexpected joy of love with a man about who she is ‘just crazy.’
Settled in the opulent den of her Manhattan apartment, surrounded by plush furnishings and heaping floral displays of scarlet, fuchsia and purple peonies, Earhardt reflects: ‘Nobody walks down the aisle and plans for a divorce. I was a really strong Christian, and I wanted to be married forever to one person. Life didn’t work out that way for me.’
It is six years since Earhardt’s divorce from ex-husband Will Proctor, 41, was finalized, but it is clear she still bears the scars of their very public split.
Earhart and former Clemons University quarterback, Proctor, met on a blind date in 2012 and married that same year.
The union coincided with a string of professional successes for Earhardt.
She got her start at Fox News in 2007, at the age of 29, but it wasn’t until 2013 that she was offered a slot presenting Fox and Friends First, which airs ahead of Fox and Friends between 5:00 and 6:00 am.
Three years later, in 2016, she was promoted to the Fox and Friends sofa.
‘I will say I’m very grateful to Fox that I was in position that a lot of women are not in,’ said Earhardt, as her miniature poodle waddles towards his mistress and looks up adoringly.
‘I remember talking to someone I was very close to growing up and she was in an unhappy marriage, and she didn’t feel like she could leave because she didn’t have any money. I never wanted to be that person,’ she said.
Earhardt pictured on the set of Fox and Friends with co-hosts Lawrence B. Jones, left, and Brian Kilmeade, right
Indeed, she isn’t that ‘person.’
The apartment walls are hung heavy with artwork. Lush floral arrangements are peppered throughout the spacious living area from the den, replete with fireplace, to the formal living room and on into a dining room with a table that can seat 12.
But while Earhart’s public life went from strength to strength, her private one crumbled.
She gave birth to daughter, Hayden, in 2015 and motherhood was, she smiles, everything she hoped it would be. Marriage, however, was not.
Divorce proceedings began in 2018. Earhardt can’t speak to the details of the split due to the terms of the settlement that she and her ex eventually reached in 2019.
These days the former couple, who both live in Manhattan, co-parent amicably.
Proctor works regular office hours, so he takes Hayden to school unless he is traveling for work. Earhardt picks their daughter up at the end of the day. Hayden splits her time between her parents’ homes.
According to Earhardt, ‘I learned a lot through it all – not to be judgmental. Things happen and you roll with the punches through life.’
‘I was in a position where I had my own financial support. I was able to take care of myself. I had a baby, and I wanted her to be in a happy home, not just one I stayed in because we were married.’
There, of course, was no way she could have known how much that difficult decision would change her life for the better.
As she changes topics the beaming smile that faded as she spoke of her divorce, returns, ‘Sean is the most generous person, ask anybody who’s worked with him.’
For years, when Earhardt appeared on Fox News’ primetime juggernaut show, Hannity, and she regarded her co-worker, Sean, as a friend. All the while, she was unaware that he had gone through a difficult separation of his own from his wife of 20 years, Jill Rhodes.
‘I didn’t know Sean had gone through a divorce at first,’ Earhardt said. ‘Nobody did. It was very private. I only found out when we started comparing notes and stories because he knew I had gone through mine.’
Then in 2020, Hannity asked Earhardt out on a date.
She smiles again: ‘We asked our boss first. I said, ‘I really want your support because I’m crazy about this guy.’ We are very close because we work together, and I trust him, and I know him so well.’
‘He was just there for me when I was going through a really hard time. We kept it quiet for a while to make sure that we were going to work out and we just enjoyed each other’s company, and I fell in love with him.’
Divorce proceedings began in 2018. (Pictured: Ainsley with ex-husband Will Proctor)
Earhardt, pictured in her plush Manhattan apartment, with miniature poodle, Rosie Tiny Buttercup
Two days before Christmas last year Hannity surprised Earhardt with a wedding proposal at the church where they worship near his home in Palm Beach, Florida.
‘It was kind of surreal,’ she recalls. ‘The minister had all the Christmas lights on, all of the candles were lit. He was there with his cup of coffee, and he just looked at us and said, ‘Have at it.’
At first, Earhardt says, she was confused, but it quickly dawned on her where all this was going.
‘We sat in the first pew for a while and chatted about our relationship and the pain of all we’d gone through but how wonderful it was that God has redeemed us and given us love again,’ she remembered. ‘Then he walked up to the altar, went down on one knee, pulled out a ring box and he proposed to me.’
They haven’t yet set a date but are leaning towards a small private ceremony with just their children – Hannity has a daughter, Merri, 24, and son, Patrick, 26 – as witnesses. Something low-key appeals, Earhardt says, because ‘We’re both such public figures and we’ve both done this before.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, both are very clear that marriage this time round won’t look anything like their previous unions.
For a start, there will most definitely be a prenup. It’s not romantic, she admits, but ‘divorce happens.’ And they will also maintain their separate lives and homes.
Earhardt lives and works in New York Monday to Thursday, while Hannity lives full-time in Palm Beach. Each Friday, she picks up Hayden and hops on a plane to join her fiancé in his $23.5million pad there for a ‘low key, casual weekend.’
‘It’s not conventional. We live on opposite ends of the East coast but when you love someone, you make it work,’ she says. ‘I love my time with Sean in Palm Beach. We always do a family brunch after church on Sunday and then Hayden and I fly back. I love my New York life too.’
Little wonder. With its plump cushions, deep sofas and sashed drapes Earhardt’s apartment could be a set of HBO’s the Gilded Age.
In a city where square footage is wealthy, this capacious apartment is conspicuous proof of it. Though Earhardt wasn’t born into this lifestyle.
Hannity and Earhardt, pictured together at a Waffle House in South Carolina in January 2023, started dating in 2020
Her father, Wayne, was a college basketball coach in Columbia, South Carolina who worked three jobs to see his kids through college.
Her mother, Dale, was a kindergarten teacher who taught for 33 years, barely missing a day, a work ethic that made an impression on her three children.
Ainsley is the middle child – she has a sister three years older and a brother five years her junior.
At the age of 39, Dale was diagnosed with diabetes. Ultimately, complications of her illness led to her death on October 22, 2022 at 72 years old.
For the last five years of Dale Earhardt’s life, she needed round-the-clock care having suffered a severe stroke in 2017.
‘We all took turns taking care of her and went home every weekend for the first few years and then we had Maggie who was a nurse who came in and sat with mom pretty much 24/7,’ Earhardt said.
As Earhardt talks about her mother, Dale’s influence is clear – a through line connecting her daughter’s childhood to the life she leads today.
Dale died on a Saturday and Earhardt went to work the very next Monday, telling Fox and Friends viewers, ‘You’re probably wondering how I came to work today. The answer is my mom would have wanted me to.’
It was also from her mother that she inherited a love of classic movies. They would watch them together – ‘An Affair to Remember,’ ‘The King and I,’ Kleenexes at the ready – and little Ainsley would dream of taking to the stage herself.
‘My mom was such a romantic that growing up in her home allowed me to be more theatrical,’ she says. ‘I signed up for theater. I was very artsy. I tried dance – I wasn’t very successful at that – but I was always performing.’
Those two passions – the screen and the stories of others – are, Earhardt says, the pillars on which her career in journalism was built.
She studied journalism at the University of South Carolina in Columbia and secured a job as a reporter for WLTX, the local CBS affiliate before she’d even graduated.
In 2000 she became the channel’s morning and noon anchor and then moved to San Antonio, Texas, to anchor the weekday morning and noon news at local station, KENS.
Earhardt got her big break that same year, moving to New York City for a role at Fox News. She admits, ‘I was terrified. I was 29 years old, and I knew I had to talk about politics, and I didn’t know the first thing about them.’
‘So, I was terrified when I started, but journalists ask questions, and you learn.’
Indeed, she did, both professionally and personally.
‘Sometimes you can feel alone during those dark times, especially when you’re in the public spotlight, but life is great now,’ said Earhardt reflecting on her life today.
‘It’s a rollercoaster and it can be chaotic, but I’m loving every second of it.’
