Fox News star Jessica Tarlov has revealed how she learned her gravely ill father was nearing death on her wedding day, months before she landed a regular seat on “The Five.”
Tarlov, 42, recounts the intensely personal stretch in her new book, “I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends,” describing how she got married while 12 weeks pregnant as her father’s years-long battle with tongue cancer entered its final stage.
“The good news: I found the right guy,” Tarlov writes in an excerpt published by People.
“My short, pink-lace dress with feathers was gorgeous. And I was twelve weeks pregnant, which was very exciting.”
Tarlov then wrote: “The bad news: It was the day I found out that my dad was going to die very soon.”
Her father, Mark Tarlov, was a film producer who later became a winemaker. He had been diagnosed with tongue cancer in 2007.
According to his wife, Mark Tarlov, who lived in the Tribeca section of Manhattan, fell ill after being exposed to what was believed to be toxic air in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that leveled the World Trade Center just a few blocks away.
Jessica Tarlov and her husband, Brian McKenna, initially planned to marry in a civil ceremony at San Francisco City Hall after getting together during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On the morning of the ceremony, Tarlov’s mother told her she needed to take her father to Memorial Sloan Kettering.
He made it back in time for the wedding, arriving in a wheelchair with a tracheal tube and unable to speak clearly.
“Everyone cried. A lot,” Jessica Tarlov recounted.
“The mix of happiness and sadness was one of the most intense feelings I’ve ever experienced.”
She said her husband’s family had never met her father before the ceremony, and McKenna’s mother later told her she feared he might not survive the event.
Her father’s health continued to deteriorate that summer as pneumonia repeatedly sent him to the hospital.
Tarlov wrote that after he and her mother decided to stop treatment, the family gathered at home around his bed.
Shortly before midnight, the journo, her mother and her sister climbed into bed with him while McKenna waited in the living room.
“We each told him it was okay to go,” she wrote. “And then he left us.”
Her father died in July 2021.
At the same time, Tarlov’s career at Fox News was gaining momentum.
Juan Williams had stepped away from “The Five,” opening a spot on the show, while Tarlov had already built relationships with several of its hosts through appearances across the network.
“I was getting more comfortable in my own skin on the air,” she wrote.
When Tarlov was eight months pregnant with her first daughter, Fox tapped her to become a regular co-host of the primetime program.
Her father never got to see her take on the role.
Tarlov wrote that he previously worried about her appearances on “The Five,” sometimes having her mother screen episodes before he watched them because he feared seeing his daughter get shouted down.
But before his death, she said, he had become excited about her work and the confidence she was developing on television.
Tarlov later broke down on air while discussing a charity event hosted by Jon Stewart and Pete Davidson for 9/11 first responders.
She began talking about her father and started crying, prompting guest co-host Will Cain to put a hand on her shoulder.
Tarlov said viewers responded positively to the moment, helping convince her that showing vulnerability could create common ground even with people who disagreed with her politically.
“Crying over my father’s death that day felt like an enormous release,” she wrote.
“Like I didn’t have to hide what I was going through from my colleagues — or the viewers.”
Tarlov’s book is due out Sept. 15.
Fox News is run by Fox Corp, the sister company of News Corp, which owns The Post.
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