TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie makes rare comment about divorce ‘failure’: ‘Most difficult time’

Savannah Guthrie is getting candid about going through a divorce.

Before marrying her now husband Michael Feldman, with whom she shares kids Vale, 11, and Charley, nine, in 2014, the TODAY anchor was married to Mark Orchard for four years.

The former couple married in 2005 but ultimately divorced in 2009, a time the news anchor has since called “the most difficult time” in her life.

Speaking with her former TODAY anchor Hoda Kotb on her Joy Ride podcast last week, Hoda asked Savannah what the most difficult time in her life was, to which she answered: “Probably the most difficult time was when I was getting separated and divorced from my first husband.”

“I was in my 30s. I felt old, but I now see that I was pretty young, and I was sad about it,” she noted.

“And I was also starting a new job at a place called NBC,” she added of TODAY’s network, recalling how she was “trying really hard to make my way and make my little dream come true while other dreams were falling apart.”

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 “It made me have to really dig deep, and I felt like a failure,” she confessed.

However, the dark time brought some light: it reconnected her to her faith. “I think that’s when actually my faith became even more solidified because I realized I didn’t have to be perfect to be loved by God,” she said.

Savannah further shared: “I didn’t even have to be close because I was definitely a failure. And I really felt loved and carried by God, and that was such an important, integral moment of life.”

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Though Savannah spoke candidly about the impact of her divorce now, she previously rejected discussing it while appearing on Monica Lewinsky’s podcast reclaiming back in July, explaining why she didn’t delve into the topic in her 2024 book Mostly What God Does.

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“I don’t want to talk about getting divorced,” she said at the time, emphasizing: “It was horrible and sad and it broke my heart.  It took me years to recover. I’m not blaming anyone but I don’t really want to get into it.”

In her book, Savannah noted she wouldn’t be sharing details of some of the difficult moments she alluded to, writing: “I’m down here and my feet are burning on the pavement — I just don’t want to tell you why the pavement was so hot or how many blisters I had on my feet … I don’t want to give you the gory details. But I do want to share with you and I understand that you may have these questions and maybe this won’t be enough for you.”