page_title: Meredith Baxter
section_title: Marriages and children
hierarchical_section_title: Meredith Baxter / Personal life / Marriages and children
caption_attribution_description: Meredith Baxter with Terry Genz at the APLA benefit, 9/7/90
context_page_description: Meredith Ann Baxter is an American actress and producer. She is known for her roles on the ABC drama series Family and the NBC sitcom Family Ties. A five-time Emmy Award nominee, one of her nominations was for playing the title role in the 1992 TV film A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story.
context_section_description: Baxter has been married four times and has five children. In 1966, she married Robert Lewis Bush and they had two children — Theodore Justin "Ted" Bush (born May 10, 1967) and Eva Whitney Bush (born August 6, 1969); the couple divorced in 1971. In 1974, she married David Birney and was known professionally as Meredith Baxter Birney. The couple had three children, Kathleen Jeanne "Kate" Birney (born December 5, 1974) and twins Mollie Elizabeth and Peter David Edwin Birney (born October 2, 1984) before divorcing in 1989. In 1995, she married actor and screenwriter Michael Blodgett; they were divorced in 2000.
  On December 2, 2009, she came out as a lesbian during an interview with Matt Lauer on Today, and on the Frank DeCaro Show on Sirius-XM OutQ 102. In 2005, she began a relationship with Nancy Locke, a general contractor. They were married on December 8, 2013, in Los Angeles.
  Baxter said she began her first homosexual relationship in 2002. She stated that finally coming to terms with her sexual orientation opened her eyes to the fact that for many years she knew something was different about her and why her relationships with men had failed.
  On March 1, 2011, Baxter made another intimate revelation while appearing on NBC's Today show. She promoted a new memoir that alleges emotional and physical abuse by her ex-husband David Birney, father of three of her children. ABC News tried to reach Birney for comment but could not. It claimed that he had told NBC he was denying the allegations. The ABC News website reported on March 1, 2011:
  Meredith Baxter says in a new book, Untied, that she was a victim of emotional and physical abuse.
  Baxter, the actress best known for playing hippie mom Elyse Keaton on the 1980s sitcom Family Ties, said that the abuser was her then-husband David Birney, who has denied the allegations.
  In her memoir, Baxter alleges that Birney hit her more than once. "It was so sudden and unexpected, I couldn't tell you which hand hit me, or even how hard," she writes. "I do recall thinking, 'I'd better not get up because he's going to hit me again.' "
  
  She writes that she coped with the marital violence by drinking heavily, but has been sober since 1990 (the year after she and Birney divorced).
  Regarding the fact that Baxter's marriage to Birney lasted throughout the entire seven seasons that she worked on Family Ties, ABC News explained,
  Baxter said that her work helped her cope and she did not share her personal story with others.
  
  "You learn to compartmentalize," she said on NBC. "When I got to the [television] studio, my home life was not happening. Nobody knew anything. I didn't have a social life. I did my work, I went home."
  The day after Baxter discussed Birney on the Today show, she traveled to Chicago to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show for further discussion of the topics covered in her Untied memoir. Others who appeared included her Family Ties co-star Michael Gross. Winfrey's staff had arranged for him to surprise Baxter on-camera. Gross confirmed the assumption that Baxter had made throughout their seven years of working on the sitcom, that no one connected with the series had known or suspected that Baxter's husband was abusing her at the time. Gross was affectionate with Baxter on camera and expressed sorrow that she had endured such an ordeal for so long.
  Birney categorically denied the claims that he had abused her in a statement to People magazine.
caption: Baxter in September 1990
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