What You Didn't Know About Barbara Walters' Daughter, Jacqueline Danforth

Publish date: 2024-05-19

As Barbara Walters’ groundbreaking career continued to put her in the spotlight, Jacqueline Guber found it difficult to cope with her mother’s fame. “I never felt like I fit into her world,” she confessed in the 2002 interview with NBC News’ Jane Pauley. Guber also wrestled with being adopted.

As a young teen, she began cutting school in favor of the New York club scene and tried to mask her pain with meth, Valium, and other drugs. Then in 1984, Guber ran away from home, hitchhiking 800 miles within a month. Walters was frantic, but on the advice of an expert, she didn’t get law enforcement involved.

Once Walters finally learned her daughter’s whereabouts, she sent a Green Beret to take Guber to a wilderness intervention program in Idaho. “[T]o send a child away is heartbreaking,” she told Pauley. “My baby? My baby’s no longer with me? I have to put her in someone else’s hands? And I did.” By that time, Guber was ready to get clean. “At that point in my life, for some reason I looked around,” she said in the interview. “And I thought, you know what? This is not a bad thing. If my mom hadn’t called that transport company, I’d have been dead.” Guber eventually moved to Maine, where she married wilderness guide Mark Danforth and opened her own wilderness therapy program for teen girls. 

Post source: The List

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