U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy speaks before U.S. Vice President JD Vance delivers remarks at a MAGA Inc. event in Sterling Heights, Michigan, US., August 31, 2026. REUTERS/Jeff Kowalsky
Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy said she desperately "tried to escape" her marriage to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, calling their first year together "horrible."
Campos-Duffy made the remarks in an October 2023 episode of the couple's Fox News podcast, "From the Kitchen Table," while interviewing their daughter Evita Duffy Alfonso about her marriage. The interview drew fresh attention this week after a clip was posted on X on Tuesday.
The Duffys have built much of their public life on their Catholic faith and their family. Campos-Duffy has spent years dispensing marriage advice on television and on the podcast.
During the 2023 mother-daughter discussion, Campos-Duffy asked Duffy Alfonso, who was about a year and a half into her own marriage, what the biggest surprise had been.
When her daughter said nothing had, Campos-Duffy answered the question herself, reaching back to her own first year as the wife of Sean Duffy.
"I mean, I think — because, Evita, my first year of marriage was famously horrible," Campos-Duffy said on the podcast. "And thank God that I married Catholic, so I knew I was — well, I tried to escape, actually. I called your grandmother."
"And at one point, I don't know, I was a couple months in, and I was like, I gotta get out of here," Campos-Duffy continued. "This is horrible. I don't wanna be married."
Campos-Duffy recalled begging her mother: "I said, 'I wanna come home.'
"And she said, 'I'm sorry. You don't have a home here anymore," her mother told her. "'You better work this out with your husband."
"And that was probably the best advice I ever got, but I had to work it out," Campos-Duffy added. "But I would say it went only up from there."
"We had a really hard first year adjusting to living with one another," she admitted.
Later in the same conversation, the Fox News host warned her daughter that couples who avoid conflict often do not last.
"We've met couples who say they never fight, and within a few years, they're divorced," Campos-Duffy said.
"The conflict resolution has been a little bit of a challenge, and we still are working on it, because we just have really different ways of dealing with conflict," Evita Duffy Alfonso said of her own marriage.
Campos-Duffy and Sean Duffy met while filming the MTV series "Road Rules: All Stars" and married in 1999, according to HuffPost.
They now have nine children, and both hold national platforms, with Campos-Duffy co-hosting on Fox News and Sean Duffy leading the Transportation Department.
Their marriage returned to public view this summer through "The Great American Road Trip," a YouTube series funded by sponsors including Boeing, Toyota and Shell, as reported by the New Republic.
In the sixth episode, filmed in Arizona, Sean Duffy mentioned that his wife arrived an hour late to their wedding before she offered her own advice, HuffPost noted.
"The key to a good, long-lasting marriage is to marry somebody very good-looking that you're attracted to because marriage involves a lot of forgiveness, and it's easier to forgive someone when you're very attracted to them," Campos-Duffy said in the series.