Danuta Pfeiffer

Danuta Pfeiffer (née Rylko, formerly Soderman) (born February 22, 1949) is an author and a retired journalist. She is best known for co-hosting The 700 Club with Pat Robertson and Ben Kinchlow from 1983 to 1988. 

She was born in England after World War II to a father who was from Poland and worked as a sculptor. Her mother  was a nurse and English.

Danuta Rylko and her parents moved to the United States as a child shortly after she was born. She grew up in northern Michigan, near Bellaire.

She began her career in San Diego, California as a newsreader on the radio, and was co-host of SunUp San Diego on KFMB-TV from 1976 to 1983.

Rylko was hired by the Christian Broadcasting Network after becoming a born again Christian. She was hired to be CBN's foreign correspondent in Jerusalem, but was instead made co-host of The 700 Club days after arriving at CBN's headquarters in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Reflecting on her experiences, she wrote: "But no one ever asked me about my politics. I was converted by association from my liberal democratic feminism to conservative Republican fundamentalism. I felt like a wolf in sheep’s clothing adapting somewhat awkwardly to becoming one of the sheep." 

She was the first journalist to report the story of the John Anthony Walker spy ring. She interviewed Walker's daughter, Laura Walker Snyder, for CBN. During the interview, Snyder explained how her father had allegedly intimidated and manipulated his children into becoming spies.

She married Swedish businessman Kai Soderberg in 1983, six months after joining The 700 Club. Soderman was a suicidal alcoholic and the two eventually divorced after she moved back to California.

She was fired by Robertson in 1988 after he learned that her then-husband, Kai Soderman, had previously been twice married and divorced. 

She stopped being a Christian after her experiences at CBN and returned to San Diego where she hosted  Danuta Time, on KSDO radio in the late 1980s and a news commentator on KUSI-TV in the early 1990s. She moved to Colorado, where she was a columnist for the Colorado Eagle, before moving to Oregon  in 1994 to be closer to her family. There she met and married her second husband, Robin Pfeiffer, a winery owner, in 1994.  

Since 1994, she has been co-owner, with her husband, of Pfeiffer Winery in Oregon. In 2016, she supported Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign.

Pfeiffer has written a memoir called Chiseled: A Memoir of Identity, Duplicity, and Divine Wine (2015) about her life in general as well as her experiences with CBN. Her most recent book is Libertas, the first book in a trilogy (three-book series) called A Pocket Full of Seeds, which is a 19th century historical fiction about runaway slaves who took the difficult journey on the Oregon Trail to seek freedom in the Northwest of the United States.

Bibliography
Watersafe Your Baby in One Week (as Danuta Rylko), 1983
Dear Danuta: Cries and Whispers of Searching Hearts (as Danuta Soderman), 1986
A passion for living (co-authors: Danuta Soderman & Kai Soderman), 1987
Chiseled: A Memoir of Identity, Duplicity, and Divine Wine (as Danuta Pfeiffer), 2015
Libertas, Book One in the Pocket Full of Seeds Trilogy, (as Danuta Pfeiffer), 2021

References

Other websites
personal website
Inside the 700 Club: Pat Robertson's former co-host speaks out - article by Danuta Pfeiffer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

C-SPAN interview on her memoir, 2017

Television evangelists
Living people
1949 births
American television talk show hosts
American autobiographers
21st-century American novelists