One of America’s best-known television personalities has gone public with a chapter in her life that has gotten little attention, and the most famous man in American politics plays a big role.
During an interview with conservative and former ESPN commentator Sage Steele published Friday, longtime morning TV host and Kathie Lee Gifford recounted how Donald Trump protected her from a demented stalker in the 1990s.
And how it shaped her view of the man who is now president today.
The incident occurred in 1990s, as Fox News reported, when Gifford was hosting the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
She had just given birth to her daughter, Cassidy, less than two months before, and her now-late husband, the now-deceased NFL great Frank Gifford received a phone call from the FBI.
She said the caller told her husband a “psychopathic murderer, a rapist and murderer” had raped and tortured his own aunt — and was now hunting the new mom.
The FBI advised Frank Gifford that the couple should keep their normal schedules to avoid alerting the criminal that they knew about the threat, and to let the FBI handle it from there.
Frank Gifford agreed on one condition, she said, that he make a phone call to Donald Trump. Gifford said Trump told her husband:
Are you surprised Trump acted so swiftly to protect the lives of Gifford and her baby?
“Frank, don’t you worry about it. I’ve got your girls. I’ve got your girls. And don’t you worry.”
“Frank called back the FBI and said, ‘I called Don Trump. He says he’s going to take care of my and my daughter,’” Gifford said.
And he did, Gifford said. From sending a helicopter to the Gifford home in Greenwich, Connecticut to bring her and the baby to Atlantic City, to making sure she was surrounded by security personnel for the length of the pageant, Gifford told Steele.
And since she’d been kept in the dark about the nature of the danger, she didn’t understand why.
It was only on the final day, when she saw a newspaper headline that blared “Kathie Lee Gifford Death Threats.”
“Then I understood what Donald had done,” Gifford told Steele. “Then I understood what Frank had done … and all of that.”
Gifford said she learned from the FBI that the man who was stalking her had eventually been arrested, and that he was sent to prison.
The American public has had many views of Trump since the 1990s, from real estate magnate to reality show star to the apex of American politics, but Gifford’s own view is shaped by the incident from decades ago.
“The story I just told you is the man I know,” Gifford told Steele.
“Donald saved my life, saved my daughter’s life, and if I called him today would save it again. People don’t know that about him.”
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