Wedding Bells

Meet John Molner, Katie Couric’s New Fiancé

Fifteen years after she was widowed, Katie Couric is getting hitched again.

We should have seen it coming. Katie Couric dropped a series of what now seem like hints this January in an interview in More magazine.

“It’s actually surprising to me that it has been almost 15 years and I haven’t remarried,” she said. “I think life is more fun when you have someone in your life. And I always wanted to find a father figure for my daughters, but it hasn’t worked out that way.”

Nine months, one beach sunset proposal, and one “spectacular diamond ring” later, Couric, 56, is ready to walk down the aisle again, with 50-year-old banker John Molner. They have been seeing each other for over two years.

“Yes it’s true!” Couric tweeted this morning.

Their relationship started with a bit of scandal. Molner was the recipient of some bad press when his then-27-year old ex-girlfriend claimed the financier had cheated on her with Couric. “Yes, John cheated on me, That’s all I have to say,” Jessica Hsu said in 2012.

Cautious at first, the pair reportedly got together at the urging of mutual friends and refused to be photographed together. But the press reported they were close at a breast cancer benefit in the summer of 2012 and they went to a screening of The Perks of Being a Wallflower for their first public date in September. By May 2013, pictures of Couric and Molner cuddling were all over the Internet.

So, who has captured the heart of America’s sweetheart?

“He’s great. He’s from Chicago. I love Midwesterners,” Couric gushed to reporters in May. “We’re having a great time. He’s really funny and very successful in his own right. In a different line of work. A little more age appropriate,” she said, hinting at criticism lobbed at her for her last boyfriend who was 17 years younger.

Molner is classically handsome and is as successful as you’d expect from anyone betrothed to the country’s most energetic anchor.

The head of mergers and acquisitions at investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman, Molner graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with honors from Trinity College and from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, according to his company profile.

Molner, whom Couric says his soon-to-be mother-in-law “really likes,” has one teenage daughter with his ex-wife, Jane. Following the nuptials, Molner will become a stepfather to Couric’s two girls, Ellie, 21, and Carrie, 17.

Couric was married to Jay Monahan, a lawyer and legal analyst for NBC, until his death at the age of 42 from colon cancer, just nine months after he was diagnosed.

She went through a very public mourning period for Monahan. At an awards luncheon in 1998, Couric described the hopelessness that can come with such a loss. “The last year of my life is still too difficult to grasp and too painful to recount,” she said. “How do you go on when fate delivers such a crushing blow that it causes permanent damage to your heart?”

Because of her work raising awareness for the disease that took Monahan’s life—she got an on-air colonoscopy in 2000, which won her a Peabody award—she’s often had to relive and replay that tragic time in interviews.

“If I could spare other families the tremendous pain and loss of losing someone too young, or at any age, to this disease, I really felt I had an obligation to do so,” she told Larry King in 2008.

Couric’s talk show Katie is set to begin its second season in September.

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Brandy Zadrozny

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