Amid the Supreme Court hearing arguments on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and all of the Today show shakeup rumors at NBC, comes a silver lining.
Jenna Wolfe, the news anchor of NBC’s Weekend Today program, appeared on the Today show Wednesday morning to not only announce that she’s expecting her first child—a girl—on Aug. 27, but also publicly come out as a couple with her partner, NBC News correspondent Stephanie Gosk.
“I have some big news, this is actually big for me,” Wolfe announced on Today. “I’m actually pregnant. I'm quite pregnant, in fact. My girlfriend Stephanie Gosk, who works here also at NBC, we're expecting a baby girl at the end of August. Stephanie's extremely adventurous, she's been all over the world. And you know me, there's not a building I haven't jumped off of… so, for us, this is nothing like that. This is the adventure of a lifetime.”
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Their announcement is also featured in this week’s People magazine. Wolfe, 39, and Gosk, 40, have been together for three years and Wolfe, who the couple decided would carry the child, recently underwent artificial insemination with an anonymous donor.
“This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to us,” Wolfe told People. “But I don’t want to bring my daughter into a world where I’m not comfortable telling everyone who I am and who her mother is.”
Wolfe was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and at the age of five, moved to Pétion-Ville, Haiti, where she grew up. Her family moved to the U.S. in 1989, and she graduated from Binghamton University with a B.A. in French and English in 1996. She began her journalism career that same year as a news and sports reporter for Binghamton’s Fox affiliate, WICZ, later serving as the sports anchor at WHUF in Rochester, followed by a stint as the first female sportscaster at WB affiliate WPHL in Philadelphia.
From 2002 to 2004, she was a reporter-anchor on MSG SportsDesk, a program on the MSG Network, and then moved to ABC, where she spent three years as both a weekend anchor for Eyewitness News this Morning and sports reporter. She joined NBC’s Today as a correspondent in 2007, and served as co-anchor on Weekend Today from 2007-2012, before being demoted to news anchor in a move that reportedly didn’t go over too smoothly. Wolfe is in terrific shape and an admitted sports nut who loves skydiving, waterskiing, and racquetball.
After graduating from Georgetown University with an economics degree and serving time in the Peace Corps, Gosk began her journalism career as an off-air producer for ABC News, covering the 2000 presidential election. She later served as a producer at ABC, producing and reporting stories on the Iraq War while embedded overseas with the U.S. military, as well as stories on Hurricane Katrina. She moved over to NBC News as a correspondent in 2006, and has covered everything from the death of Osama Bin laden from Pakistan to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
“We were constantly on the road, juggling a thousand balls at once,” Wolfe told People. “It's a miracle we got it all together.”
She added, “In a way, we can't wait to start. Stephanie keeps saying, ‘Hurry up! What's taking so long?’ And I'm like, ‘[the baby's] cooking!’”
