4 Relapses & 5 Rehabs: Elizabeth Vargas' 13 Brutal Rock Bottom Moments In Alcohol Battle
Sept. 16 2016, Published 9:57 a.m. ET
Elizabeth Vargas was a respected TV reporter by day, and a desperate drunk by night. In her new book, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction, the 54-year-old mother of two comes clean about the worst moments of her alcohol battle.
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The veteran Good Morning America journalist swears she drank moderately for most of her adult years — until she hit a dangerous downward spiral in 2009. One night, a nanny canceled the night before she was expected to start, setting a drunken Vargas off into a rage. "Are you f***ing kidding me?" she says she screamed into the phone at the nanny's agency. "Fix this now!"
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She downed six giant glasses of wine, and continued drinking the following day. Her then-husband, musician Marc Cohn, admitted her to the hospital. "Once the wine wore off, I was shocked and horrified at what I had done," she recalls.
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Vargas began drinking alone in bars in an effort to hide her dangerous habit from her family. "I was leading a double life: one as a network news anchor, traveling the world, reporting stories…the other as a woman who was sneaking drinks and hiding it from her husband and her friends," she writes.
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Her two young sons began to be affected by her drinking. After boozing on a flight home from India, Vargas ignored her kids and passed out in bed. "No hello hugs for the boys, who were eating dinner in the kitchen; no exciting stories of my trip far away," she admits. "Just another hangover to sleep off, another important moment with my family that I missed."
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After drinking through a family vacation to Florida in the spring of 2012, Vargas checked into rehab for the first time at Cirque Lodge in Utah. But she didn't tell anyone where she was going, and only stayed for two weeks.
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Two months later, she was already drinking again. On July 7, 2012, she began drinking wine at work and blacked out for an entire 13 hours. The star woke up at 3 am in a hospital room.
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Vargas later learned that a kind stranger drove her home after spotting her on the side of the road. By the time she arrived home, she was unconscious, and a doorman called an ambulance. In the hospital, doctors discovered she had a potentially lethal blood alcohol level: .4.
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She returned to Cirque Lodge and began her second stint in rehab. "Elizabeth, do you know how close you came to dying?" a counselor asked her. "You cannot have another drink in your life. Ever."
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After a stint of sobriety, she began drinking again after losing an interview with Amanda Knox to Diane Sawyer. In November 2013, she was shipped off to rehab again in rural Tennessee after she arrived to a 20/20 shoot intoxicated one afternoon.
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Just four days after leaving treatment, Vargas relapsed. "I f***ed up," she confesses. "I hurt my children, whom I adore, again. I hurt and enraged Marc yet again." Friends and family forced her back into rehab.
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After coming clean in a tell-all interview about her alcoholism, Vargas learned her husband had been cheating on her with a close friend. By the summer of 2014, she was drinking yet again.
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On August 16, 2014, the reporter claims she officially hit rock bottom. On her son's birthday, a news crew arrived to her vacation home in Malibu to record a segment. However, she couldn't perform her job because she was intoxicated. Vargas soon checked into a detox facility in Pasadena, California.
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When she returned to New York, Vargas checked into an outpatient rehab and sober house. Two years later, she lives in recovery. "Every day I thank God for another day of sobriety," she writes. "I do not take it for granted."
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