Former Fox News anchor Laurie Dhue has revealed that she was an alcoholic during the years she worked at the network. Dhue tells her story to INSIDE EDITION.
"I'm an addict. I needed the alcohol to get through my life." It's a shocking admission from a former national news anchor.
Laurie Dhue was a rising star at Fox News Channel, the number one news network. On the air she was stunning and composed, with never a hair out of place. But Dhue says off camera, she was hiding a secret: she was an alcoholic.
"I'm not proud to say that I showed up at work hung-over. There were probably two or three mornings a week where I would drag myself in to work and think, 'Why did I do that again last night? Why did I put myself through this?' "
"Were you ever drunk on the air?" INSIDE EDITION's Diane McInerney asks.
"Never. I was never drunk on the air, nor did I ever drink any day when I walked into that studio, and I want to make that very clear," she says.
Dhue says she routinely downed two bottles of wine with dinner: "For me, drinking two bottle of wine was something that might have happened over the course of a couple of hours and boy did I pay the price the next day."
"I watched you for years on Fox News Channel and you always looked stunning, you always looked amazing, how did you pull it off?" McInerney asks.
"I put on a brave face every day, I put my hair and makeup on, I did what I had to do, but I was suffering in silence this whole time and I was in so much pain I literally did not know what to do," Dhue says.
According to Dhue, no one at Fox News Channel ever knew her secret.
Dhue left Fox News in 2008 and quit drinking, but it wasn't until just recently that she revealed her well-kept secret at a private dinner.
"What I didn't know was that there was a reporter in the room who then chose to write about it literally about two hours after the dinner was over," Dhue says. "I thought about going into hiding for 20 minutes, but then I realized this was a tremendous opportunity to help people. If one person who is watching INSIDE EDITION can take away the message that there is help out there, then I've done my job."
