Danuta Pfeiffer

Danuta Pfeiffer (née Rylko, formerly Soderman) (born February 22, 1949) is an author and a retired news reader and reporter on television and radio. She is best known for co-hosting The 700 Club, a Christian talk show, with Pat Robertson and Ben Kinchlow from 1983 to 1988.
Early life
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 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."CATCHING UP". John Farina. The San Diego Union-Tribune. (January 14, 1985 Monday). (retrieved via Lexis)

Working for the Christian Broadcasting Network
Rylko was hired by the Christian Broadcasting Network after becoming a born-again Christian. She was hired to be their reporter in Jerusalem, but was instead made co-host of The 700 Club days after arriving at CBN's headquarters in Virginia Beach, Virginia. She later 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 news reporter to tell the story of the John Anthony Walker spy ring. She interviewed Walker's daughter, Laura Walker Snyder, for CBN. During the interview, Snyder said her father of bullied his children to try to make them agree to be spies when they didn't want to."DAUGHTER SAYS JOHN WALKER PRESSED CHILDREN TO BE SPIES," By Susan Rasky,  New York Times (June 18, 1985, Tuesday, Late City Final Edition). (retrieved via Lexis)

She married Swedish businessman Kai Soderberg in 1983, six months after joining The 700 Club. Soderman wanted to kill himself and was addicted to alcohol and because of this, the two of them divorced after she moved back to California.  She was fired by Robertson in 1988 after he found out that Soderman had been married and divorced two times before.
After CBN
She stopped being a Christian after her experiences at CBN and went back to San Diego where she hosted  Danuta Time, on KSDO radio in the late 1980s and was a news commentator on KUSI-TV in the early 1990s. 
She moved to Colorado, where she wrote a newspaper column for the Colorado Eagle,"The clarity that comes from crisis." Danuta Soderman, The San-Diego Union Tribune, (January 25, 1994 Tuesday) (retrieved via Lexis) 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.

Writing books
Pfeiffer has written a book called Chiseled: A Memoir of Identity, Duplicity, and Divine Wine (2015) about her life in general as well as her time 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 fictional story that takes place in the 19th century and is about runaway slaves who went on the difficult Oregon Trail to seek freedom in the Northwest of the United States.

List of books she has written
 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
 Firmitas, Book Two in the Pocket Full of Seeds Trilogy, 2022

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

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