Rachel Maddow is one of the most talked-about news correspondents on television; her sharp wit, cheerful demeanor and captivating storytelling have resonated with audiences even before The Rachel Maddow Show premiered in 2008.
These days especially, Maddow has become a voice that people turn to as the Trump administration becomes more and more controversial. But how well do Maddow’s fans really know her? Here are a few facts that might surprise you.
Maddow has been in a relationship with her partner, Susan Mikula, for almost two decades. As it turns out, the two met by pure happenstance; at the time, Maddow had just moved to Western Massachusetts to work on her dissertation when Mikula hired her to do some yard work.
“It was very Desperate Housewives,” Maddow quipped to People in 2010.
Years later, in 2016, Maddow told journalists that she fell in love with Mikula at first sight.
When you think of first dates, you typically think of dinner, drinks or a movie. Which makes Maddow’s first date with Mikula feel all the more wild.
“My first date with Susan was at an NRA ‘Ladies Day On The Range’ event, and that is as close as I have ever gotten to the NRA,” Maddow said in 2011, according to the Huffington Post.
Speaking to Rolling Stone the following year, Maddow admitted the two actually like to shoot firearms. “Susan has the hand-eye coordination,” Maddow told the magazine. “But I can’t control my movements.”
Ever wonder what Rachel Maddow does in her down time? If you guessed fishing, you’d be 100 percent correct.
“I go fishing every chance I get. Sometimes after my show, I fish at midnight in the Hudson River in NYC,” Maddow told Us Weekly.
Maddow also spoke about her love of all-things fishing during a 2012 Reddit AMA, during which she revealed her favorite smell is a “clean river [on a] spring day.”
“[The] Biggest fish I ever caught was a striper that was two inches shorter than the one my mom caught ten minutes earlier,” Maddow added later on. T
Ever wonder what Rachel Maddow does in her down time? If you guessed fishing, you’d be 100 percent correct.
“I go fishing every chance I get. Sometimes after my show, I fish at midnight in the Hudson River in NYC,” Maddow told Us Weekly.
Maddow also spoke about her love of all-things fishing during a 2012 Reddit AMA, during which she revealed her favorite smell is a “clean river [on a] spring day.”
“[The] Biggest fish I ever caught was a striper that was two inches shorter than the one my mom caught ten minutes earlier.”
Speaking to The Daily Beast (via Buzzfeed), Maddow revealed her parents found out she was gay by reading about it in her college newspaper.
“I did an interview with the student newspaper about being one of the only two gay freshmen on campus” the Stanford graduate said. “The mistake I made was that I had not come out to my parents.”
According to Rolling Stone, someone then took the newspaper clipping and mailed it to Maddow’s parents. “They took it poorly at first,” Maddow said of her parents, who were “devout Catholics.”
On the bright side, Maddow’s courage earned her support from her classmates. “Rachel made one choice when she was 17, and it was a domino – it made all the other choices clear,” Stanford alumni and closse friend of Maddow’s, Jill McDonough, told Rolling Stone. “No one at Stanford was saying they were gay – there were no other out lesbians – and she saw that it was a lie. The choice was, ‘I’m not going to be a hypocrite. I’m going to have courage.'”
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